Happy Holidays, Betas and Commenters!
Illustrated fic!
HAKENKREUZ AND CHAOS (Scenes From a Hidden War)
Genre: Historical (eve of WWII)/horror (Lovecraftian)/and, er, also, comedy and romance!
Pairing/Characters: Aziraphale/Crowley, Dagon, Hastur, Famine, War, Death, Nyarlathotep, some OCs, some historical figures, and some Deep Ones, Elder Gods, and Night-Gaunts, and Shoggoth.
Rating: NC-17
By: vulgarweed (story) and quantum_witch (art).
Summary: The Curious Incident of Lower Tadfield was not the first time our world has been in immortal peril, nor will it be the last. This particular incident, decades earlier, had far-reaching consequences, as well as Aziraphale’s most regrettable fashion moment of all time-which is saying something.
Kinks/Warnings: Knifeplay. Breathplay. D/s. Uniform kink. Also, it treats Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny as nonfiction, which merits a warning in its own right.
Author's Notes: My recipient dropped out, but this story had momentum all its own. And it wasn't readily regiftable (it's a CTHULHU MYTHOS CROSSOVER WITH NAZIS. MERRY FRIGGIN' CHRISTMAS). But let it stand as a tribute to the commenters and the beta-readers, who deal with things far scarier than this and emerge unscathed, and make this festival fun.
The moon laid pale lilies of light on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with star-dust. -H.P. Lovecraft, “The Crawling Chaos”
***
I, Mugwort, half-brother of Wormwood, am but a winged imp of little standing among the legions below, and as imps, we all are considered by the fallen great ones to be half-mad already and slow of wit besides, and therefore there is no reason my account should be believed. There is indeed no reason why I should mark it down it all, in fact. Better that what I know should perish utterly with me. But as inconsequential as I may be, I am still a demon, and in my pride, let no one who remembers me say I “did the right thing.”
It was many millennia into the exile of my Fallen rulers, and I had long been employed, to little income and greater shame, in the mailroom of the office of My Lord Dagon.
Precisely nineteen centuries, to the year, had passed since the whelp of he who laid us low was broken on the Cross. It was then that My Lord’s inexplicable absences began. The mail began to pile up, unanswered, and my letter-opener rusted and dulled, and I grew nervous for lack of the verbal abuse to which I had become accustomed.
And when he returned from his never-accounted-for ventures abroad, he was often…quite odd. For him to smell of stale seawater and brine and rotten fish was not previously unheard-of, but lately he also carried the aura of frozen snow, of animal blood, of car exhaust. There was the time he brought back a mysterious recording of sound so terrible to my ears I was forced to seek the solace of the screams of many damned to purge its eldritch treble and violence from my mind. “It’s Wagner,” my Lord snarled. “Learn, guys.”
I had nothing to learn but terror, which only increased as my Lord insisted upon quitting Hell at every opportunity now. Once I even risked, and endured, his wrath by begging him not to venture to those perilous lands Above and Beyond, where no demonic comforts could be relied upon. He cuffed me in his anger, and upon his arm I could see fresh scars of battle and smell a whiff of the dreadful cold beyond the realms of Earth.
Still I prevailed upon him, My Lord, stay. We all knew the tales of those demons who had spent too much time Above and been all but lost to us, unrecognizable, weak and barely evil shadows of themselves, even beginning to resemble the humans we harvested…
If I had known then what I know now.
That there are ways in which even the greatest ones among the Fallen can be commanded.
That there are humans who have come to resemble and even exceed Us in our evil, and that beyond them stand Powers upon Powers.
That even My Lord could be seduced, flattered, deceived, a pawn…or else he has another Face that even Himself Below, our Lightbringer, may have not seen.
I seek oblivion now, for it is the closest I may ever come to unseeing what I have seen.
***
Berlin, 1919
“I thought I smelled the scent of blood,” said Schwarz. “You look positively sated with it, my dear.”
“And from you, that’s a grave insult,” said Abendröte with a polished-steel smile. “I ought to try to taste yours. If you had any left.”
“Hardly anyone in Berlin does,” he said. “Since most of it’s spilt on your battlefields.”
“And the rest is your handiwork,” she said gaily. “Never let it be said I can’t show professional admiration for a job well done.”
“A wheelbarrow full of reichsmarks for a single potato,” he gloated as modestly as he knew how. “That is, if you can get one.”
“There are great things ahead for you, I think,” she said. “Just imagine it…a whole city with not a single dog or cat left. And then the rats come, and then Weiss gets his engine running…and then there are no more rats either.”
“I'd have thought we’d seen times as good as they would ever get for us,” he said. He was very dapper in his black suit, his tall polished hat. Top hats and starvation, that was Europe. And strolling its streets as if she owned the place (which she arguably did) still drunk on bloodshed, a lady in red. They were seen together often these days; her beauty just made his inherent insult to the people more aesthetically poignant.
“I think there may be greater things ahead yet,” she said. “I was not defeated at Versailles. Far, far from it.”
“Is it the end, do you think?”
“Not yet. But the humans might well wish it were.”
Abendröte had been the queen of the hour for many years now. Even now, her admirers outnumbered her enemies. Berlin had been glamourous for her once, and it would be again, but for now, she had a far more compelling project going on elsewhere, begun years ago in Vienna. There’d been a man once-oh no, she’d never stoop to conquer quite that directly, when all she had to do was whisper.
Europe was full of smelly and irrationally angry art-school rejects who all looked more or less the same whatever the content of the politics they harangued the crowds about, and maybe, just a few years ago, no one but she could have smelled the heady, coppery scent of sheer potential in one in particular who didn’t look very impressive.
She had a special kind of art school just for the likes of him. She appreciated his true latent talent-not for designs in pen and paint, but for redrawing national boundaries in blood.
“You must remember this,” she’d whispered, as barely audible as a soft respectful footfall in the grandeur of the museum, “A kiss is just a kiss-but this is Destiny, my dear.”
If he’d been aware of her presence, he showed no sign of it. Perhaps she was already ceasing to be a separate entity and becoming his goddess, his anima.
He’d been aware only of the object before him, resting on velvet with the rest of the Imperial Treasure - caring for nothing but a blade of ancient steel, wrapped in a medieval sleeve of gold with a nail set in its surface. Blood and iron. The Spear of Longinus which had pierced the side of Christ on the cross, in what was then held to have been an act of mercy.
There was no mercy evident on its weathered surface now. Just blood and iron - and a psychic resonance that could prickle the hairs of even the thickest-souled of the Austrian bourgeoisie. If the blood of Christ didn’t resonate, then the mighty grips of Constantine and Charlemagne and Barbarossa - all of whom had possessed it in the times of their fated rule and downfalls-surely would.
And they most certainly did resonate for the covetous little man who sweated and trembled in its presence in the Hofburg, the grand imperial palace with its ridiculously complicated grounds, a world away from the sordid little hostel where he lived.
The moment when she whispered was the moment when Adolf Hitler, professional nobody, ceased to covet and began to demand.
***
A rough translation from Enochian of the contents of an unaddressed letter, thrust through the mail slot of a nondescript bookshop in London, 1935:
To Aziraphale, Principality of London, Our Agent in the Ways of Mankind.:
I cannot go through the usual channels. The fear that grips me most is caused by something that officially speaking does not exist. As you well know, the Four are abroad and wreaking much havoc. I do not usually concern myself with human matters - that is your department. But what the next ride of War may waken is beyond the merely human. They are meddling in my realm, the roof of the world and the depths of the sea, where man was never meant to go. Even now they are defiling Tibet and seeking for Thule, searching for what they believe to be the origins of a “master race.” They will not find that, but there is more in these places to be stumbled upon, and that could be catastrophic, and not only for them. There are very good reasons these realms are forbidden, sealed, sunken, frozen, chained, and erased from history.
I cannot say more at this time. You must do what you can to keep the human meddling safely in the realms of their usual mundane brutality, away from the relics of Our Most Blessed Lord and the dwelling places of that which does not officially exist.
You must go into the heart of the storm that is gathering. You will know what to do; I have faith in you because I must. I do not know if I will be able to write again. If you must communicate with me, go to the nearest park or place of water - if at all possible, my assistant Shakziel will meet you in the shape of a waterfowl. But do not abuse this. We cannot be seen. I cannot stress this enough.
This letter will evaporate once you have read it.
Godspeed.
Your brother in the Presence,
Rampel
***
"Here is a man who has broken his every promise, and kept his every threat." --William Russell (on Adolf Hitler), United States Embassy in Berlin.
Berlin, 1936
Sometimes Crowley cursed his own love of relaxation. It seemed like only minutes ago he'd finished the exhausting work of helping to inspire 12-tone music and absurdist theatre, and then celebrated by falling asleep under a happy naked pile of gender-bending cabaret performers.
When he climbed out of bed at last, he saw nothing from his window just off Potsdamerplatz but uniforms and flags.
There were people, to be sure, but to his eyes they somehow looked unusually dim and grey in the rain. Only the ubiquitous red, black, and white seemed to be in full colour.
Oh bloody He-ck, he thought. So that loudmouthed little prick and his backwards Buddhist thing and his arse-backwards Nordic rubbish got some power after all. Why didn't I take my nap in London instead?
There was a note that had been shoved beneath the door of his suite.
CROWLEY -
THIS HAS TO BE SHORT. THERE IS A CONFLICT IN HELL. I KNOW THAT'S NORMAL, BUT THIS ISN'T. DAGON HAS HAD DEALINGS WITH THESE HUMANS, AND SO HAS HASTUR, AND THEY ARE NOT TALKING TO EACH OTHER. I KNOW THEY HATE EACH OTHER BUT THIS SEEMS TO BE BIGGER. I WILL BE DESTROYED IF IT'S KNOWN I TOLD YOU THIS, BUT I THINK DAGON IS RETURNING TO THE DEEP ONES. BENEATH THE SEA. THERE ARE NEW SUBMARINES AND THE ONE CALLED HIMMLER HAS PLANS. THEY ARE LOOKING FOR OLD THINGS. IN BAD PLACES. THE FARAWAY MOUNTAINS, THE FROZEN WASTES. THEY WANT TO USE POWERS. I AM AFRAID TO WRITE THIS. THE DUNGEON DIMENSIONS. IF ANYONE CAN MESS THESE PLANS UP, IT'S YOU.
MUGWORT.
The note exploded in a gentle puff of reeking sulfur.
This bothered Crowley. It was the sort of note that one would want to be able to crumple up in one's hand dramatically.
Once he came down the stairs, he was relieved to learn he hadn't missed the Olympics yet. All the investigations into all that tedious business about Thule could wait until he'd inflicted some rigged gambling schemes and watched a lot of half-naked people sweating.
Or so he thought, until he made his way down to the street. "Heil Hitler" didn't roll off his tongue any easier than "Hail Satan" did, and it made a good deal less sense, and while he appreciated the smack in the face to Martin Luther, he was reluctant to even watch Triumph des Willen, since on some level he blamed Das Blaue Licht for putting him to sleep for four years in the first place.
Then, however, he understood. Everything Hell had ever tried to do to collect souls and had been too hidebound and creaky to pull off, somehow, this was it. It wasn't the laughable pomposity of Satanism, it was a sort of hip, effective meta-Satanism that didn't even need Satan in the conventional sense. Could this be it - the Apocalypse, the end, and not with Hell either victorious or defeated, but simply rendered irrelevant and obsolete, like a horse-and-buggy when compared to the brand-new Bentley still waiting for Crowley somewhere outside of London?
Crowley wondered if a similar plan was in effect somewhere that would have a parallel effect on Heaven. Humans being humans, a good part of him hoped this was so, but he very strongly doubted it.
***
Please pause just a moment, if you will, for a last tale from an insignificant chronicler. The best I can hope for is that my account will languish eternally unread in the library of the Silver City, and its overdue fines will be beyond even Heaven’s accounting.
I am Shakziel, the Angel of Water Insects. I serve my Lord and Creator in a small and well-defined domain. Long have I loved my work, for it is a tiny and busy and orderly microcosm of Creation. And long and happily have I served the lord of my choir, the regal and glorious Rampel, Angel of Mountains and the Ocean Depths.
Many are the angels who occupy themselves with the business of Man. My Lord Rampel is attuned to those spaces our Father made where men never are, where they cannot survive long, which contain Mysteries that are last to be documented by our Father’s most curious children. It is to the domain of Rampel that our kind retires when we most desire clarity and peace.
In days of old, it was rare indeed to see my lord troubled. Lately it is not so, not at all.
I see in him a weight and a dimming. When Rampel returns from his airless alpine domains, he is tense and pale, and when he returns from the lightless depths, he often looks exhausted and, once, I am terrified to say, wounded.
I know of nothing my Creator has made that could or would harm him. Even the biting flies I allow to feed upon me with such profound love would never touch him.
It began to lead me towards the beginnings of a most blasphemous thought, and a thought so horrible as to begin to rend the immortal fibres of my very sanity. If I did not think my extinction imminent in the battle that is coming, I would not even dream of committing this to writing, and my quill would refuse the deed in my very hand.
What if my lord Rampel was wearied in struggles with entities that Our Creator did not make?
***
Paris, 1937
Travel was becoming more and more uncivilised, Aziraphale thought as he clutched his threadbare suitcase close and hustled through the train station. Of course, the French had always been so. He chided himself for an uncharitable thought for a people who had been so badly battered by war, and then promptly forgot about it, since there were pastries to eat, wine to drink, and, fortunately, cathedrals to visit that had survived the war --so far.
Perhaps some minor miracles could be of help. A bit of divine ecstasy could hardly go amiss, could it?
Along the Seine, he could almost pretend there had been no war at all. The lovers and the cafe layabouts looked a little the worse for wear, but no less insouciant for all that. (He tried to put the memory of that night at the Moulin Rouge with Crowley out of his mind, but alas, the absinthe had had the opposite effect on him that it did on most humans; try as he might, he remembered everything.)
He'd never quite managed to acclimate himself to French bread, however. Its crust was too much work for the slight reward the inside provided. Fortunately, where there was water, there were ducks. There were always ducks.
One of them opened its beak, not to eat, but to talk.
Aziraphale, it said in Enochian, Otto Rahn is the hound of Himmler. He's a romantic. If you met him at any other time, you'd like him. More's the pity. How have you missed it? He's been tearing up the south of France, digging up the Cathars, looking for the Grail. Well, you needn't worry about that. Rampel tells me dark things are stirring in Tibet. A member of Ernst Schäfer's expedition was carried from the side of a mountain by a creature with loathsome rubbery wings that gibbered and shrieked as they approached a certain cave where the Yeti is said to live, and the Sherpas panicked and would go no further. The Germans went on inside.
Rahn will go to Iceland. Thule. He will search for the drowned continent, the roots of ancient things beneath the frozen sea. They want to wake the Old Gods, Aziraphale. They think they will get Wotan and Thor, maybe. That is not what they will get.
The duck looked around nervously. Its fellows, unpossessed by the angelic, swam obliviously and quacked for more bread. Use any means necessary, Aziraphale. You can't stop the war between humans. You might be able to stop the war that could destroy us all.
The duck ruffled its wings, with a signature flash of supernatural pattern that Aziraphale recognised as, just as the note said, Shakziel. Then it returned to placid, untroubled essence of pure duckhood.
Aziraphale sighed and wondered if the trains would improve further east. He doubted that, very much.
***
He hadn't realized how far into the belly of the beast he had yet to go.
It turned out that the growing virus was a lot more than political slogans and a costume. There were archaeologists. Historians. Archivists. Booksellers. Publishers. Researchers. Explorers. And they were seeking to undermine the very surface of the modern world itself. Turning up his metaphorical collar against the metaphorical cold, Aziraphale just had to follow the path of stirred-up dust and ancient bones and strange statuettes and barbarous writings in forgotten alphabets. Watch the rising growth of disturbing, far-offscale-of-human architecture. And discover, to his shuddering lack of surprise, that such a path always coincided with a rise in murders and suicides, of clerks and assistants institutionalised and chittering idiotically, filling endless ledger books with nonsensical screeds of terror.
Even his last-ditch attempt to secure information in a city that was still relatively lovely--Vienna--was foiled by another member of the booksellers' fraternity, a bad-tempered hunchback named Ernst Pretzsche. Competition Aziraphale could handle quite well, veiled or unveiled threats were of no great consequence to him. What he really could not abide was not the unpleasant nature of Pretzsche's clientele or collections either--it was really, when it came down to it, the smarmy social climbing and what Aziraphale really, really preferred not to believe were sexual advances.
What he gleaned from his few ventures among Pretzsche's piles of dust, notes, and mold led him to conclude -- with the aid of a few calculations that would be understood only by a few exiles, one shell-shocked Great War veteran dribbling in a sanitorium, and a few people not yet born--that, like it or not (and he did not like it) he was honour-bound to be Berlin bound. He'd never liked Berlin much. It was so, so, well, German. So for the time being, he would have to be as well.
More than once, as he schmoozed his way into darker and darker places, he sent metaphysical feelers out for the traces of his counterpart's hand in all of this. There was nothing strong, nothing conclusive, although once in Berlin, he was sure he could sense Crowley. Somewhere. Not terribly active. Aziraphale nibbled his manicured nails in nerves as his own slightly dubious ways of opening doors for himself began to accumulate and weigh on him.
What was the point of having an Arrangement if one didn't have a guarantee that one's own elaborate bendings of one's moral code didn't have a counterweight to straighten them out again?
Well, nevermind. Toward the end of 1937, as the snow and icy rain began to fall, it was becoming very clear that all the dark energy - the very points of the hooked cross revolving around their own centre like a hurricane--were turning towards Austria once again. And Austria was turning round to face it.
His counterpart had perceived the same psychic weather patterns.
Vienna, 1938
Crowley’s natural response when dealing with the vertiginously jarring was, at least when on earth, rather human: hysterical, side-stitching laughter. It was hardly the effect Aziraphale wanted, but in truth, the angel found it rather a relief. This particular effort of disguise and blending in was giving him such an existential rash that his body had actually contracted by imperceptible molecules in an involuntary attempt to avoid too much intimacy with the costume.
Finally, between painful gasps and the occasional undignified snort that called to mind a sort of reptilian pig, Crowley managed to straighten out his body and regain his speaking faculties. “When I said you needed to catch up with modern fashion, this wasn’t what I had in mind,” he finally sputtered. He tapped his chin contemplatively, “Black is not your colour. Although…the runes are a nice touch. Does it make you itch? I thought angels were allergic to irony.”
“It is necessary. For the time being,” Aziraphale said icily, in flawless Viennese-accented German.
“Well, before you ask,” Crowley hiccupped, “It does not make your arse look fat. Quite the reverse. And the boots are very sharp. Did you polish them yourself or find an Untermensch to do it?”
“CROWLEY!” Aziraphale barked, rising to his full height behind the desk. “I did not allow you to find me so you could point out to me in excruciating detail how ill-suited I am to the uniform of the Third Reich. I did so because this is not a mere matter of human war. Now, I’m rather ashamed to admit this, but some time ago, I was asked by my, ahem, superiors to investigate a certain holy relic once in the possession of Napoleon, which had since fallen in among the treasures of the Habsburgs, and been of great interest for some time to, er, the Fuhrer. Had I undertaken this research ten years ago, I probably could have done so without the sartorial abomination and rather clunky cover story…”
“I’m still trying to figure out how you passed the blood-purity test.”
“My capacity for minor miracles in socially awkward situations is being sorely tested, I must admit…”
“Have you had to make any sperm donations for the Fatherland yet? That'd be something. The Nephilim of Niflheim. How'd you get out of that? I mean, if someone were to accuse me of being Juden I’d just drop my trousers, but…”
“CROWLEY. You are not showing this situation the proper gravity. And why are you blushing and fidgeting so?”
“Because everything you say in German while dressed like that sounds like you’re ordering me to get on my knees.”
“Darling, I know you’re doing your best to be civil, but right now, you’re profoundly rude.”
Crowley just thrust his hips out a little further and said, “You have to understand the way I am, Mein Herr.”
“Oh, I assure you I do, dear boy, you’re the very essence of degenerate art. But as far as I know, we are not here to argue National Socialist sexual mores. Why is your side involved? Tell me now.”
Crowley suddenly sat up straight-still aroused but more challenged-and told Aziraphale honestly, “As far as I know…there is no official word. Yet. But I have been contacted, just, shall we say, under the table.”
"Does no one do anything any other way these days?"
"I have to confess I'd rather like you to do me on the table."
Aziraphale arched an eyebrow in a manner that, on anyone else in the world, might have been described as fiendish. "Are you trying to tell me that you won't tell me anything unless I, er, interrogate you?"
"Now that you mention it, no, you're right! I won't! You'll have to!"
Aziraphale pulled up a sturdy chair behind the desk and tapped impatiently on its surface with the riding crop that served no purpose except it went with the ensemble. Typical Nazis. All crop and no horse. "Well, I suppose we'll have to get this done with, since otherwise you'll be pestering me for interrogation at a far less convenient time in this little adventure."
"I'll probably do that anyway, Mein Herr."
"You can keep calling me that too."
"Whatever you say, Herr Oberfickführer Engel of the Ahnenerbe..."
How did you know I was in the Ahnenerbe?"
"What else would you be?"
Aziraphale had Crowley's number on this insufficient level of insubordination by now. If there were a dictionary for such things, next to "mouthy bottom" there'd be a picture of Crowley. (And in Berlin in the 20s, there had been, and there was.)
"Shut up and crawl over here," Aziraphale ordered. And Crowley's smirk completely vanished.
In a blink, Crowley was on his knees at Aziraphale's feet, hands trembling as if they barely dared to touch his tall, shiny boots. And he wasn't allowed yet - Aziraphale gave his wrist a sharp rap when he tried it.
"Up on the desk," Aziraphale barked, dragging Crowley up by the hair and making sure the demon kept those eyes averted, even when the crop touched his cheek. Aziraphale set it down when it looked like Crowley was in too much danger of being entranced by an object. Roughly, Aziraphale grabbed Crowley's legs and placed them on the arms of his elaborately carved chair, and smiled in satisfaction at Crowley's panting response to find himself nearly in Aziraphale's lap, pinned by a hard blue gaze.
After all, he had been begged to use any means necessary.
For the first time in his new career, he actually drew the dagger he'd found so annoying before. It was sleek and sharp steel, pure functional unpleasantness in an undeniably beautiful package. He smiled. "So tell me, English spy, what have your people told you about the Ahnenerbe?"
"I'll never talk," Crowley lied.
"Really?" said Aziraphale, taking Crowley's shirt in one hand and slicing it open in a clean stroke, cold sharp metal brushing Crowley's chest and belly with the most menacing delicacy.
"No."
"Do you know what the Ahnenerbe is searching for?"
"The roots of the Master Race....ah," Crowley gasped, losing words for just a moment as the cruel blade pressed at his throat.
"And were you sent to find this out?" Aziraphale moved the dagger slowly down, pausing for just a moment at Crowley's chest before chopping open the fine leather belt, can't get that anywhere in Berlin these days except the black market, and through the trousers too, making sure to ever so lightly scratch something very sensitive indeed. Crowley moaned and jerked his hips, not sure whether it was toward or away. With a hiss of his own, Aziraphale squeezed the handle just once and the blade came alive with deep blue flames. "You never really forget how," he said.
Crowley muttered something unintelligible and closed his eyes as Aziraphale pushed his legs further apart, the wreckage of his trousers now gone entirely, and pressed that burning holy heat closer and closer to his vulnerable inner thighs, and his...
"Mugwort!" Crowley gasped. "He's an imp! Underling! Works for Dagon! He said...there was something about submarines. And mountains. And Thule! I don't get it!"
"You'd better," Aziraphale said, palming Crowley's Eier and bringing that light flame within a gnat's breath of die Eichel, which was already straining towards any contact it could get.
"He said....oh fuck, please...it was Himmler. Wants to..."
Aziraphale's hand had moved further back insistently, squeezing and demanding and none too gently pushing with miracle-moist finger into Crowley's Arsch, which offered far less resistance than Poland would up until the Battle of Kock. Crowley writhed and begged further impalement, become rapidly inarticulate in many languages, and tried to use his legs to pull Aziraphale closer until a quick swat on his thigh discouraged that, or at least it tried to, for Crowley was all in favor of swats on the thigh.
Exasperated, Aziraphale tossed the knife over his shoulder and concentrated on his hands--one giving Crowley a clinically sadistic fingering, the other rising up to clamp around his neck. The better to ignore his begging cock with. "Now understand this. I will not allow you to come until you've told me everything I want to know. Do you understand?"
Crowley could barely nod, held pinned, face going flushed then pale, as pleasure and a thrillingly genuine sort of fear made his spine light up with need. He could no more have used his mouth to speak than to swallow a Panzer, but he didn't have to. He could project:
aw yes. please, keep fucking me like that, please, give me more. It's Dagon. Dagon and Hastur. Dagon might go to the Deep Ones and Hastur to the cold reaches of space. Oh fuck. Oh fuck I can't tell if that feels good or it hurts but fuck me, don't stop can't breathe, getting lightheaded. No oxygen where the Elder Gods live, don't use it. Is that the real Root Race? Invented all that blasphemous writing, the ancient scripts. Suicides, murders. SS wantsss it, preciouss. Fuck, please if you don't give me your cock I'm gonna die I swear, I'll find a way to...Filthy rites. Barbaric. Human sacrifice on a massive scale. All to raise up...it'll open the fuck please don't let me breathe I'm gonna...Dungeon Dimensions could open. Oh yeah. Oh yeah right there yes, please, that's all I swear....
"DANKE!" Aziraphale cried and released Crowley's neck, and as the demon gasped for breath, he reached down and seized Crowley's cock with similar force and fire, squeezing and twisting and teasing as Crowley cried out hoarsely and went rigid, releasing sticky white heat all over Aziraphale's impeccable uniform, belt and trousers and, of course, shiny boots.
The angel watched him recover, that slim, twitching body slowly starting to come down to normal, and then grasped his damp dark hair one more time. "And now you'll clean that up, of course."
Slitted pupils still stretched wide, still wearing his savaged shirt, Crowley slithered down off the table and between Aziraphale's legs, addressing with his serpentine tongue everywhere a white stain had a danger of showing up on black, still panting as he traversed the boots' slick surface, and from time to time paused to nuzzle his cheek and his hair, catlike, against Aziraphale's legs. And from time to time Aziraphale deigned to acknowledge this, playing with his slave's hair in an almost tender way, until with a yank he indicated that he desired further service.
Which Crowley attended to with blasphemous gusto. Those black trousers fit so well, it was such an honour to have a chance to undo them. Crowley worked at the clothing for so long that by the time he actually reached Aziraphale's cock, he was so hungry that he sucked it so deep into his throat that his eyes watered and he gave up breathing altogether; any level of sacrifice was worth it to hear the angel's moans and hitching breaths.
***
Later, when Crowley had regained some semblance of dignity and trousers, he still stuck longingly close. Oh dear, Aziraphale thought. I suppose the poor boy must have some issues surrounding demonic hierarchies. We can work on those when all this is over.
"So am I going to have to torment you further to get a discussion of strategy, or will you accept an IOU until we've prevented disaster again?"
Crowley smiled. "I have all the ration cards I need for that, don't I?"
"Excellent. So what you mean to tell me is, that I have more connections, and higher-placed ones, among the SS than you do?"
"That would be about the size of it, yes. Don't I deserve a good whipping for that?"
Aziraphale sighed. The war hadn't even properly started yet, and he could already tell it would be a long one. "Well, this I do know. Both Hitler and Himmler are obsessed with the treasures of the old Holy Roman Empire--which was, of course, none of the above, I can tell you in strict confidence--and in particular, the Heigilische Lance, which is allegedly that of the Roman centurion who pierced the side of Our--well, my--Lord and Saviour. I'm quite sceptical, myself. But we shall see. The relic has acquired a sinister reputation over the centuries and been owned by a tediously long list of long-dead conquerors."
"Overcompensating for something?"
"No doubt. Please raise your thought process a little further above your belt, I think this is important."
"That spear already has a good deal of blood on it, don't you think? Metaphorical and otherwise? Whether it's the real one or not, doesn't it seem like someone whose grip on reality was tenuous to begin with could do a fantastic job of convincing himself it was an object of power?"
Aziraphale nodded. "I blame Wagner, personally. I can't believe you slept so much last century I had to go to the opera by myself. You can't imagine."
Crowley shuddered. "I've heard the recordings. I was in Berlin, remember? You can almost literally hear nothing else."
"Tell me more."
"I didn't tell you the whole truth. Shouldn't I be punished for that? I've been to Nuremberg. You should see the rituals they hold there - or rather, you shouldn't. Those are ones for the masses, of course. They're quite pretty. Buxom frauleins in dirndls and strapping young studs with flags and torches and all that. And I haven't been to Wewelsburg, but I've eavesdropped on some who have. They're practicing some things that are, at the very least, annoying. They've called up a few minor demons and held them for a little while, forced some psychobabble out of them. Let me show you what Mugwort showed me."
Crowley traced a circle and some sigils on the polished surface of the table, and to Aziraphale's eyes, the wood finish dropped away into darkness. A blood-orange moon hung over a deep green, trackless forest, sometimes veiled by cold mist. There was a castle, surrounded by scaffolding.
There had once been a village - quaint and ancient with its gabled roofs and age-blackened timbers, its high, narrow houses leaning together at unwholesome angles above the narrow medieval street with its glistening, moss-slick cobblestones. The familiar sounds of horse-hoof and night-watch faded away as the village began to change--the finer houses strung with the swastika banner, the poor ones cleared away in a muddy jumble of timbers. Flames.
And skinny, hungry-eyed people in ragged coats herded between the stone jaws of the castle walls, down and down into the earth, while torchlight flared on the walls and bloodthirsty, martial drumming and singing came from within, echoing down the slopes of the hill and bouncing off the sides of the valley below.
And then there were screams, as the drumming built to a frenzy, rising into a cacophonous climax played by what sounded like a massive orchestra of idiot automatons, savaging the most violent peaks of, who else?, Wagner.
And then the ground began to shake.
And then the moon changed color, and the sky came alive with loathsome rubbery wings of mountain creatures that should not be, awakened by the noise and enticed by the smell of meat, the herald angels of...what, exactly?
"Poor Mugwort," Aziraphale sighed.
"Poor us. Both your contacts and mine seem convinced we're the only ones who can fix it."
There was a long moment as they both stared at the surface of the table, which had reverted to mere mahogany, immaculate but for the slight prints of Crowley's buttocks still visible, and, for once, not disrupting the chilly aura of terror.
Aziraphale sighed. "You know what this means."
"It means we're going to die?"
"No. It means I have to do research."
***
This is a scene that takes place on the outskirts of Hell.
There is a restless spirit who was once named Dietrich Eckart. He is a footnote of history. He was a playwright - perhaps the Goethe to Hitler's Faust, but with little of the talent. Eckart's true talents lay in mysticism, and ways to twist it. Deep within the Thule Society, he found the key to the purity of the blood. Later, he learned the hard way just how incorrectly he had read it.
There is indeed a Master Race (more than one, in fact). It is not and never will be human. They do indeed predate the coming of men and their gods--all the gods, including the fur-clad warriors of sword and claw.
There are indeed degenerate mongrel races. They are not any entirely-human ethnicity, but the descendants of men and monsters, who shamble around the rotting ruins of once-human villages, in wild and ancient and uncivilised places.
There is an ongoing war among them, far beneath the thin veneer of the young human world. There are dimensions to which the human Hell itself is just a sort of foyer or cloakroom. In this world, the embodiment of War wears no lovely face.
The soul of Dietrich Eckart has glimpsed these dimensions--smelled the fishy musk of the children of Dagon and heard the mad piping of the cold, thin people of Hastur.
He pounds, endlessly, eternally on the gate of the human Hell, desperate for its relative safety. Lucifer himself will not admit him.
***
This is a scene that takes place on Earth, in the land currently called Deutschland.
The German rabble would have been so appalled to learn that there was a Black Man who dictated all of Karl Maria Wiligut's theories.
Wiligut was SO close to Himmler, after all.
But this Black Man was not "black" in the way dark-skinned humans are. He was BLACK in the same way that darkened rooms that make children cry are. He was BLACK like the space in the void where no stars are.
All the spaces in the earth where humans live, where there were tombs and ancient spaces that predated the locals for millennia, that were determined to be too sacred to explore, he was there.
With his hand on Wiligut's and Himmler's shoulders.
He is Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos - in vaguely human form, adept and erudite. And it was he who whispered to all the avatars of the Master Race: “You must have The Spear. It is a relic of the weak, human, jewish "god" we must defeat. Capture it, own it, wield its power to kill millions, and I will make sure you all Ascend, as you deserve.”
***
This is a scene that takes place in a world between the worlds.
AZIRAPHALE. YOU CANNOT STAND AGAINST THIS THREAT.
The more light Aziraphale gathered to himself and emitted, the more furious and blinding his halo and the brighter and faster his wings, the more light that seemed to trail off into fading night, being swallowed by the blackness between the stars in Azrael’s wings.
“I am an angel of the Lord,” he declared in his full voice, as he had so rarely had call to do, and worried that he sounded rusty. As nice it would have been to have his old sword once again, he was beginning to suspect it mightn’t help.
YOU ARE AN ANGEL OF THE LORD OF HEAVEN, THE KNOWN COSMOS AND THE FIXED STARS. THE LORD OF ANGELS AND MANKIND, AND OF ALL THINGS THAT GROW AND WALK ON THE GOOD EARTH. THESE LORDS COME FROM…ELSEWHERE. THEY CARE NOTHING FOR YOU, OR ANYTHING THAT MATTERS TO YOU-OR TO YOUR LORD.
Aziraphale bit his lip, a gesture that still managed to seem heroic when bathed in such light. “And yet…they are still subject to you, are they not?”
The pause that came was long. Entirely too long. Aziraphale could almost hear all the comings and goings…well, mostly goings…delayed in Death’s deliberation. I AM…NOT CERTAIN.
“What?”
WITH STRANGE AEONS, EVEN DEATH MAY DIE.
The fear that passed through Aziraphale then had such a peculiar character of newness that he almost enjoyed it. For millennia he had believed there was only One who could defeat Death, and that One was firmly on the side he thought of as his. But to learn there were realms beyond…well, it gave him vertigo in five dimensions.
“What do you think I should do, then?”
I THINK YOU SHOULD RUN.
Aziraphale’s silence was long. He wasn’t as good at it as Death, but he was motivated to try. Finally, he sighed, “And where exactly do you suggest I run to?”
Death’s silence was of a different type than before.
“That’s what I thought,” said Aziraphale. His shoulders slumped. And then straightened. He might be outranked, outpowered, and outnumbered, but he would bloody well not be outwitted.
***
With the Anschluss, and the unpleasantly giddy and flower-strewn absorption of Austria into the Third Reich, came a certain sense of urgency. There was now nothing standing between Hitler and the treasure in the museum but a flair for delayed gratification in the name of theatrics. Not to mention an extended round of untranslatable neener-neener directed at those who hadn't recognised the Führer's Very Special Destiny early enough.
Aziraphale would really have preferred not to have to skulk about in the darkened corridors of the treasure house like a common jewel thief. He would have preferred not to have to freeze time--and well-armed guards--with a flash of officious Nazi uniform frippery designed to say nothing but I outrank you, and a rather awkward salute that fixed the hypnotised gazes. Whatever those guards were dreaming about, it probably wasn't what they liked best.
"Well. There it is," said Crowley, staring at the object.
"Indeed," said Aziraphale.
"And you didn't investigate this twenty years ago when it was just a museum piece."
"I was busy, Crowley. The war and all."
"You were busy doing what? Knitting warm socks for the boys at the front? Sending them boxes of uplifting literature?"
"I'm an angel of peace."
"Says the angel wearing the SS uniform."
"Says the demon who follows my every command while I'm wearing it."
"Well, when we get out of here, I insist on having my turn to wear it."
"You've never shown any interest in borrowing my clothes before," Aziraphale said acidly. "Well, enough banter, old boy. Shall we find out the truth?"
"Let's."
With a shared resolute glance, they stepped forward towards the box together.
It was Crowley who reached out his hand first, and so it was Crowley who first yelped in pain and fell backwards as if struck in the chest by a firehoselike force.
Aziraphale bent to make sure he wasn’t too badly hurt, and the brush of his palm healed a stinging burn. Crowley's eyes, watering, opened wide. "Crowley, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Aziraphale babbled. "It's real, isn't it?"
"No fucking shit, Sherlock, it's real. I can't touch it. Blood of....ow, fuck."
Standing up, shaking, Aziraphale approached, reached out his hand and tried not to flinch, trying his blessedest to believe in the holiness.
The same thing happened to him. As he climbed up on his elbows slowly and gave Crowley his palm for the healing breath, he stared up at the box in trembling terror. "Bloody hell!" he gasped. "I can't touch it either!"
"But...a holy relic...you should?"
"It's unholy too. Constantine, Charlemagne, Barbarossa....every single conqueror who touched it steeped it in black magic, cruelty, the blood of innocents, lust for power, corruption of the Word and the Church to earthly ends, greed, hubris..."
"And if Hitler gets it?"
"Eckart was right. Rampel was right. And...sounds like your man in between down below was right. If he has it...if he uses the blasphemous rites, if he goes to the forbidden places and commits human sacrifice on a big enough scale..."
"Then it was nice knowing you, human world?"
"It's possible. I didn't believe it was but...it really is."
"Well." Crowley leaned back, taking in the stiff, regal hush of the museum, the frozen shadows of the silent guards, the pounding in his head from the marching feet, the shouts, the flowers of all things, the stifling heat wave of paranoia and hatred and overwhelming lust for abstract concepts that had emanated from the martially-guarded cars of Himmler and the Führer himself--those things always translated into horrific violence when humans wanted them that badly. And terrible architecture. Although he did like the Autobahn.
Funny old world, he thought. Will we be around to miss it? Or will those...Things...devour the demons and angels first? He leaned back, still aching, and his hand brushed Aziraphale's, and with it came an idea.
"Angel," he said.
"Yes?"
"If I can't touch it because it's too holy...and you can't touch it because it's too cursed....well, maybe, do you think? I mean sometimes, when you and I are...well..." The shyness took him by as much surprise as anyone.
"Fucking?"
"Right here? Now?"
"No! I mean, that's what you mean isn't it?"
"Yes. Well, sometimes, it's as if, I feel you. On a different level. If you understand...oh, I don't know why this is so awkward for me."
"Maybe I do," Aziraphale said, "Go on."
"Anyway...it's as though we, er, coexist. But on a different frequency than we usually do, if you take my meaning, and I mean, since I don't hurt you and you don't hurt me--unless of course I ask you to--then maybe there's something in us that balances, or neutralises..."
"So you think perhaps we could pick it up together?"
"If we're very precise, then maybe. It might complete a circuit."
Aziraphale and Crowley looked at the Spear, and then at each other. "Or fry us both."
"Well," said Crowley, shrugging. "At least we'll have tried."
They kept looking at each other. "Well, let's not dawdle then," said Aziraphale, climbing to his feet slowly and holding out a hand to help Crowley up. Crowley took it.
They kept their hands clenched as they approached the box and stood over the long blade, one on each side. "It's been nice...knowing you. Getting to know you. In every sense. Er."
"Thank you Crowley. The feeling is mutual, I assure you. All of them. Um."
The pause stretched and stretched, past even the limits of Wagnerian musicology. "Alright, now," said Crowley, his voice startlingly high and cracked. "One."
"Two."
"Three." As their hands shot forward as one to take the blade, an impulse of Crowley's other arm that bypassed his brain entirely reached out and grabbed Aziraphale's hair and pulled him in for a rough, needy, half-missed kiss. Both of them froze, held in place by waves that felt electrical, both keeping their hands around that thing that felt so nasty, that hurt, that gave them flashes of things abhorrent and agonising; terrible memories and future terrors; Falling endlessly, rising up to nothingness, being blinded by the Light and swallowed forever in the Dark.
It took an excruciating amount of time for them to lift the thing just a few inches, just long enough for Aziraphale to pull that old papal robe that Hitler would never notice missing from a nearby case and let it wrap the thing.
"Now drop it," Aziraphale murmured into Crowley's mouth. As long as they kept their lips together, it would work. "One."
"Two."
"Three."
With a thump far heavier than it should have been, the brocaded bundle plunged to the floor and lay there as if it were a mere inanimate object. Crowley and Aziraphale were wheezing from exertion, leaning on each other and looking at the Spear with matching expressions of horrified revulsion.
"How...how could that thing even be?" Crowley whispered.
"I don't like this century at all so far. Not one bit," Aziraphale complained.
"All right, now what? What do we do with it?"
"I'm worried about taking it away, honestly. I don't want to imagine what Hitler will do if he knows it's gone missing."
"He doesn't have to know. Let me be devious for a change, all right? My ego needs it." Crowley reached over, a mite impishly, and drew the dagger at Aziraphale's waist. With a grin, he spun it rakishly on his fingertip, and as it spun, it lengthened, dulled, complexified, and darkened until it was a flawless copy of the ancient spearpoint. "Now, let him have it," he said and dropped it back where the Spear had been with a disrespectful plink.
"Very devious, my dear," said Aziraphale, eye a-twinkle.
"I am, aren't I? You should let me show it off more," Crowley leered.
"Ought to be just magical enough to make a sensitive human feel something, too. Well done."
"At this stage, Hitler would have rapturous fits over a butter knife if he thought it would give him power."
"That still doesn't answer the fundamental question, does it?"
"No. Should we destroy it? I want to. I really, really don't like it."
"I don't either. But we haven't the right. I'm afraid we'd have to answer for that."
Crowley shivered.
***
Back at Crowley's hotel suite, the offending item tucked safely away in a trunk, Aziraphale sat down on the bed, boots propped up on a footstool, and put his head on his hands on his knees. "You asked about the lads from the Great War. I did minister to some of them, you know. The ones who came back wounded, and...not right...and just ill. Stayed in touch with some."
"The bookish ones? Or the handsome ones?"
Aziraphale gave him a scathing look.
"The ones who were both, then. Do go on - if there's a point."
"There is one fellow - he's at Oxford now. Rather too fond of fairy tales, if you ask me, but he's done well for himself. He has a very, very large...manuscript. Anyhow, he said that it came to him once in a tale that if one has a very powerful and dangerous object to get rid of, it's best to entrust it to the one with the least use for it or interest in it."
"So not that Yank archaeologist with the whip, then?"
"Goodness no. He's gone off after the Grail anyway. Won't see him again for a while, if ever. Any other ideas?"
Crowley scrunched up his face and stared off into the middle distance of hazy memories. "I knew a man in Berlin...Pfirsich Rommel, yes, the general's brother, but he was a pretty little flamer with no more interest in war than an eggplant has. I don't think he'd take it, though. It wouldn't match anything he owns."
"It can't stay in Austria, or Germany, or Europe at all. It wouldn't be safe."
"That's the problem with a World War, isn't it?" Crowley had the thousand-yard stare, broken only when Aziraphale's eye was struck by something in Crowley's luggage.
"This hardly seems your usual style," Aziraphale mused as he pulled out a frilly silk negligeé.
"That's an object of Nazi fetish power too," Crowley confessed. "Used to belong to Richard Wagner himself."
***
Aziraphale and Crowley would hardly have chosen to make their run for it in the middle of a riot, but what with politics as they were, they were given little choice. Aziraphale just walked, ramrod-straight, as if he owned the place. The costume was, at least, a help in this regard. As he dragged Crowley along, Crowley couldn’t help but notice that even the hakenkreuz on the angel’s arm seemed to turn and writhe as if it wasn’t comfortable either. Serves it right, Crowley thought wildly.
They almost made it through without incident.
Almost.
Violent riots get some people’s blood up; the sound of breaking glass and paving stones hitting bones touches a certain electrical nerve in the wiring of the brains of a certain type of young man who would have cursed God had he been born in a time of peace. This type claims patriotism and longing for glory, and may even superficially believe it; what they truly long for, though, is gore and fury, adrenalin and chaos, and an entire lifetime lived in an instant, crammed chock full of random horror.
“What’s this then?” snarled the first thug, probably too young to have been original SA but certainly evil enough. He fixed blazing eyes of pure bloodlust on Crowley.
“Prisoner,” Aziraphale said, doing his best to sound imperious. It would have worked in Hell. It didn’t work here.
“Off to Dachau, then?” snarled the thug’s companion-bigger and older and orders of magnitude dumber, making up for it in sheer hatred. “What is he, commie?”
“Fag?” leered the other.
“Aw, sir, don’t ship him off. Let us have fun with him here. Give the enlisted boys a little party, eh?” Big and Thick leaned in closer. “Ach, bet he’s Juden. You can tell by the snake eyes.”
“I’m not,” Crowley managed to hiss as they moved in closer. “I can prove it.”
Aziraphale made a warning sound, though he wasn’t sure whom he was trying to warn, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The chaos was in the air, and it was beginning to affect his counterpart, whose demonic aura was expanding and congealing to the point where it nearly hurt the angel to hold his arm. Any attempts at conveying, Please, my dear, don’t embarrass me, were doomed to fall on deaf ears-after all, Serpents don’t, technically speaking, hear anything. They feel vibrations. And they can snap in a moment when they sense a threat or the resonance of prey--ideally, both.
Quick as a strike, Crowley’s hands were free and opening his belt. “See, boys, it’s still got its hood on!”
What came out of his trousers was long, black, sinuous, quick, and indeed, hooded-arching and swaying its piercing-eyed, scaled head. The brownshirts squeaked and quailed as it pondered which one to strike first, and then nailed them both, one, two, in the blink of an eye. Blood and venom (and soil in the trousers) and they both clenched the fang marks on their swelling hands as they fell to the glass-littered ground, writhing and foaming at the mouth.
“Don’t worry, it’s easy to change it back,” Crowley muttered as a pale, shocked Aziraphale dragged him away.
“I am never letting you put that thing in me again,” Aziraphale muttered.
It was Crowley’s turn to go pale. “You scare too easily….”
“So do you,” Aziraphale smirked. “And you’re gullible where sex is concerned. Now can we please get through this city without any more fatalities or transformations?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Those weren't fatalities, though. They're just having memorable hallucinations.”
"So Hell does have a sense of mercy."
"If you want to call it that."
As they continued their escape, Crowley could ever-so-quietly be heard to sing, "So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu..."
***
History does not record the number of ducks that disappeared from continental Europe in the months and years immediately prior to the full escalation of World War II. Understandably, such a thing might be missed by humans, who were rather preoccupied at the time. The truth is, the number is much higher than can be explained by migration patterns, coincidence, or even habitat destruction. Which leaves, really, only one possibility. They must have been warned.
***
The rage of Hastur and Dagon was great, and Rampel flew far to escape it. He looked down with some relief as he passed over the ghastly, windswept plain of Leng, which hides among the highest mountains of the world. The barbarous inhabitants were no more (or no less) barbarous than usual, and with gratitude the Angel of the High Places left them behind, soaring ever higher, past the yaks and goats, and up to cold and pure airless realms where no bird can fly.
***
This will be my last attempt at writing anything down for a very long time, if not forever. I, Mugwort, have been condemned to that cold place outside of Hell where the mad are kept--those who were not sentient enough to do true evil, but nonetheless harmed others in their frenzies. This may be the safest place I can be, though wherever I go, there I am, and I would prefer to be anyone at all who has not these memories I do. It's not so horrifying that some sought to overthrow Lucifer himself--it's in the nature of demons. It's that they would never have thought of it were it not for the humans, and someday, they will replace us. We are not what we thought we were. They're better at it.
***
AZIRAPHALE AND CROWLEY. I MUST ADMIT. I AM IMPRESSED. AND, TRUTH BE TOLD, RELIEVED.
"Relieved?" Crowley said quizzically, gazing up into Azrael's twinkling sockets as the Angel of Death beat his great wings over the moonlit Alps.
YES. PART OF ME IS NOT READY FOR ALL THIS - he made a gesture that encompassed the world-- TO END. LEAST OF ALL MYSELF.
"Yes, well, I'm afraid you'll still get a good deal of exercise," Aziraphale said regretfully. "Nothing we've done will stop him, exactly."
THAT IS JUST AS WELL FOR YOU. MY SIBLINGS WOULD NOT BE PLEASED IF YOU COST THEM THEIR, ER, LIVELIHOODS.
"But isn't that...what I'm supposed to do?" Aziraphale said, his voice startlingly small. Death might have blinked when Crowley put his arm around the angel's shoulder, if he'd had eyelids.
YOU DID WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO DO. YOU BOTH DID. YOU SAVED IT ALL FROM SOMETHING WORSE. AND YOU ENABLED THE GAME TO CONTINUE.
"I suppose that's it, then," said Crowley, rather subdued, as he and Aziraphale handed him the glittering bundle of medieval fabric and terror. Together of course - even wrapped, neither wanted to touch it without the other.
WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO WITH THIS?
"We don't expect you to do anything with it," Aziraphale said. "We know you don't need it."
"I think we hope you'll do exactly nothing with it," Crowley clarified.
HM. WELL, THANK YOU, I SUPPOSE. NOW I SUGGEST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO GET ANY DIRTIER, YOU SHOULD RETURN TO ENGLAND. THEY WILL NEED YOU THERE...WELL, AS MUCH AS ANYONE EVER DOES.
"Thank you very much for your help."
With a chilly wave, Death was gone. Possibly to see if he could fit in a nap before the storm broke.
As he flew through the icy night around the poles of the earth, he admired the cool placidity of the Antarctic mountains. Such a beautiful place, and mysterious yet to him; nothing lived there, so nothing died there either, and he'd had little cause to visit.
It occurred to him that that wasn't a bad place to keep something both dangerous and useless, and if he'd ever have cause to come back, he could pick it up again. He doubted he would. He doubted it would matter. With a satisfied grin (different somehow from his usual) he let it drop to the glaciers below.
Just before the Spear hit the snow, something that a sane person would probably fail to describe accurately scuttled out from the rock and caught it in its savage maw, and continued on its way. It was a horror from a world beyond.
It was a steamer trunk of sapient pearwood that ran about on dozens of legs.
~end~
Vulgarweed's Writer's Notes
Quantum Witch's Artist's Notes
Thank you Commentors and Betas! You make our world go round!
HAKENKREUZ AND CHAOS (Scenes From a Hidden War)
Genre: Historical (eve of WWII)/horror (Lovecraftian)/and, er, also, comedy and romance!
Pairing/Characters: Aziraphale/Crowley, Dagon, Hastur, Famine, War, Death, Nyarlathotep, some OCs, some historical figures, and some Deep Ones, Elder Gods, and Night-Gaunts, and Shoggoth.
Rating: NC-17
By: vulgarweed (story) and quantum_witch (art).
Summary: The Curious Incident of Lower Tadfield was not the first time our world has been in immortal peril, nor will it be the last. This particular incident, decades earlier, had far-reaching consequences, as well as Aziraphale’s most regrettable fashion moment of all time-which is saying something.
Kinks/Warnings: Knifeplay. Breathplay. D/s. Uniform kink. Also, it treats Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny as nonfiction, which merits a warning in its own right.
Author's Notes: My recipient dropped out, but this story had momentum all its own. And it wasn't readily regiftable (it's a CTHULHU MYTHOS CROSSOVER WITH NAZIS. MERRY FRIGGIN' CHRISTMAS). But let it stand as a tribute to the commenters and the beta-readers, who deal with things far scarier than this and emerge unscathed, and make this festival fun.
The moon laid pale lilies of light on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with star-dust. -H.P. Lovecraft, “The Crawling Chaos”
***
I, Mugwort, half-brother of Wormwood, am but a winged imp of little standing among the legions below, and as imps, we all are considered by the fallen great ones to be half-mad already and slow of wit besides, and therefore there is no reason my account should be believed. There is indeed no reason why I should mark it down it all, in fact. Better that what I know should perish utterly with me. But as inconsequential as I may be, I am still a demon, and in my pride, let no one who remembers me say I “did the right thing.”
It was many millennia into the exile of my Fallen rulers, and I had long been employed, to little income and greater shame, in the mailroom of the office of My Lord Dagon.
Precisely nineteen centuries, to the year, had passed since the whelp of he who laid us low was broken on the Cross. It was then that My Lord’s inexplicable absences began. The mail began to pile up, unanswered, and my letter-opener rusted and dulled, and I grew nervous for lack of the verbal abuse to which I had become accustomed.
And when he returned from his never-accounted-for ventures abroad, he was often…quite odd. For him to smell of stale seawater and brine and rotten fish was not previously unheard-of, but lately he also carried the aura of frozen snow, of animal blood, of car exhaust. There was the time he brought back a mysterious recording of sound so terrible to my ears I was forced to seek the solace of the screams of many damned to purge its eldritch treble and violence from my mind. “It’s Wagner,” my Lord snarled. “Learn, guys.”
I had nothing to learn but terror, which only increased as my Lord insisted upon quitting Hell at every opportunity now. Once I even risked, and endured, his wrath by begging him not to venture to those perilous lands Above and Beyond, where no demonic comforts could be relied upon. He cuffed me in his anger, and upon his arm I could see fresh scars of battle and smell a whiff of the dreadful cold beyond the realms of Earth.
Still I prevailed upon him, My Lord, stay. We all knew the tales of those demons who had spent too much time Above and been all but lost to us, unrecognizable, weak and barely evil shadows of themselves, even beginning to resemble the humans we harvested…
If I had known then what I know now.
That there are ways in which even the greatest ones among the Fallen can be commanded.
That there are humans who have come to resemble and even exceed Us in our evil, and that beyond them stand Powers upon Powers.
That even My Lord could be seduced, flattered, deceived, a pawn…or else he has another Face that even Himself Below, our Lightbringer, may have not seen.
I seek oblivion now, for it is the closest I may ever come to unseeing what I have seen.
***
Berlin, 1919
“I thought I smelled the scent of blood,” said Schwarz. “You look positively sated with it, my dear.”
“And from you, that’s a grave insult,” said Abendröte with a polished-steel smile. “I ought to try to taste yours. If you had any left.”
“Hardly anyone in Berlin does,” he said. “Since most of it’s spilt on your battlefields.”
“And the rest is your handiwork,” she said gaily. “Never let it be said I can’t show professional admiration for a job well done.”
“A wheelbarrow full of reichsmarks for a single potato,” he gloated as modestly as he knew how. “That is, if you can get one.”
“There are great things ahead for you, I think,” she said. “Just imagine it…a whole city with not a single dog or cat left. And then the rats come, and then Weiss gets his engine running…and then there are no more rats either.”
“I'd have thought we’d seen times as good as they would ever get for us,” he said. He was very dapper in his black suit, his tall polished hat. Top hats and starvation, that was Europe. And strolling its streets as if she owned the place (which she arguably did) still drunk on bloodshed, a lady in red. They were seen together often these days; her beauty just made his inherent insult to the people more aesthetically poignant.
“I think there may be greater things ahead yet,” she said. “I was not defeated at Versailles. Far, far from it.”
“Is it the end, do you think?”
“Not yet. But the humans might well wish it were.”
Abendröte had been the queen of the hour for many years now. Even now, her admirers outnumbered her enemies. Berlin had been glamourous for her once, and it would be again, but for now, she had a far more compelling project going on elsewhere, begun years ago in Vienna. There’d been a man once-oh no, she’d never stoop to conquer quite that directly, when all she had to do was whisper.
Europe was full of smelly and irrationally angry art-school rejects who all looked more or less the same whatever the content of the politics they harangued the crowds about, and maybe, just a few years ago, no one but she could have smelled the heady, coppery scent of sheer potential in one in particular who didn’t look very impressive.
She had a special kind of art school just for the likes of him. She appreciated his true latent talent-not for designs in pen and paint, but for redrawing national boundaries in blood.
“You must remember this,” she’d whispered, as barely audible as a soft respectful footfall in the grandeur of the museum, “A kiss is just a kiss-but this is Destiny, my dear.”
If he’d been aware of her presence, he showed no sign of it. Perhaps she was already ceasing to be a separate entity and becoming his goddess, his anima.
He’d been aware only of the object before him, resting on velvet with the rest of the Imperial Treasure - caring for nothing but a blade of ancient steel, wrapped in a medieval sleeve of gold with a nail set in its surface. Blood and iron. The Spear of Longinus which had pierced the side of Christ on the cross, in what was then held to have been an act of mercy.
There was no mercy evident on its weathered surface now. Just blood and iron - and a psychic resonance that could prickle the hairs of even the thickest-souled of the Austrian bourgeoisie. If the blood of Christ didn’t resonate, then the mighty grips of Constantine and Charlemagne and Barbarossa - all of whom had possessed it in the times of their fated rule and downfalls-surely would.
And they most certainly did resonate for the covetous little man who sweated and trembled in its presence in the Hofburg, the grand imperial palace with its ridiculously complicated grounds, a world away from the sordid little hostel where he lived.
The moment when she whispered was the moment when Adolf Hitler, professional nobody, ceased to covet and began to demand.
***
A rough translation from Enochian of the contents of an unaddressed letter, thrust through the mail slot of a nondescript bookshop in London, 1935:
To Aziraphale, Principality of London, Our Agent in the Ways of Mankind.:
I cannot go through the usual channels. The fear that grips me most is caused by something that officially speaking does not exist. As you well know, the Four are abroad and wreaking much havoc. I do not usually concern myself with human matters - that is your department. But what the next ride of War may waken is beyond the merely human. They are meddling in my realm, the roof of the world and the depths of the sea, where man was never meant to go. Even now they are defiling Tibet and seeking for Thule, searching for what they believe to be the origins of a “master race.” They will not find that, but there is more in these places to be stumbled upon, and that could be catastrophic, and not only for them. There are very good reasons these realms are forbidden, sealed, sunken, frozen, chained, and erased from history.
I cannot say more at this time. You must do what you can to keep the human meddling safely in the realms of their usual mundane brutality, away from the relics of Our Most Blessed Lord and the dwelling places of that which does not officially exist.
You must go into the heart of the storm that is gathering. You will know what to do; I have faith in you because I must. I do not know if I will be able to write again. If you must communicate with me, go to the nearest park or place of water - if at all possible, my assistant Shakziel will meet you in the shape of a waterfowl. But do not abuse this. We cannot be seen. I cannot stress this enough.
This letter will evaporate once you have read it.
Godspeed.
Your brother in the Presence,
Rampel
***
"Here is a man who has broken his every promise, and kept his every threat." --William Russell (on Adolf Hitler), United States Embassy in Berlin.
Berlin, 1936
Sometimes Crowley cursed his own love of relaxation. It seemed like only minutes ago he'd finished the exhausting work of helping to inspire 12-tone music and absurdist theatre, and then celebrated by falling asleep under a happy naked pile of gender-bending cabaret performers.
When he climbed out of bed at last, he saw nothing from his window just off Potsdamerplatz but uniforms and flags.
There were people, to be sure, but to his eyes they somehow looked unusually dim and grey in the rain. Only the ubiquitous red, black, and white seemed to be in full colour.
Oh bloody He-ck, he thought. So that loudmouthed little prick and his backwards Buddhist thing and his arse-backwards Nordic rubbish got some power after all. Why didn't I take my nap in London instead?
There was a note that had been shoved beneath the door of his suite.
CROWLEY -
THIS HAS TO BE SHORT. THERE IS A CONFLICT IN HELL. I KNOW THAT'S NORMAL, BUT THIS ISN'T. DAGON HAS HAD DEALINGS WITH THESE HUMANS, AND SO HAS HASTUR, AND THEY ARE NOT TALKING TO EACH OTHER. I KNOW THEY HATE EACH OTHER BUT THIS SEEMS TO BE BIGGER. I WILL BE DESTROYED IF IT'S KNOWN I TOLD YOU THIS, BUT I THINK DAGON IS RETURNING TO THE DEEP ONES. BENEATH THE SEA. THERE ARE NEW SUBMARINES AND THE ONE CALLED HIMMLER HAS PLANS. THEY ARE LOOKING FOR OLD THINGS. IN BAD PLACES. THE FARAWAY MOUNTAINS, THE FROZEN WASTES. THEY WANT TO USE POWERS. I AM AFRAID TO WRITE THIS. THE DUNGEON DIMENSIONS. IF ANYONE CAN MESS THESE PLANS UP, IT'S YOU.
MUGWORT.
The note exploded in a gentle puff of reeking sulfur.
This bothered Crowley. It was the sort of note that one would want to be able to crumple up in one's hand dramatically.
Once he came down the stairs, he was relieved to learn he hadn't missed the Olympics yet. All the investigations into all that tedious business about Thule could wait until he'd inflicted some rigged gambling schemes and watched a lot of half-naked people sweating.
Or so he thought, until he made his way down to the street. "Heil Hitler" didn't roll off his tongue any easier than "Hail Satan" did, and it made a good deal less sense, and while he appreciated the smack in the face to Martin Luther, he was reluctant to even watch Triumph des Willen, since on some level he blamed Das Blaue Licht for putting him to sleep for four years in the first place.
Then, however, he understood. Everything Hell had ever tried to do to collect souls and had been too hidebound and creaky to pull off, somehow, this was it. It wasn't the laughable pomposity of Satanism, it was a sort of hip, effective meta-Satanism that didn't even need Satan in the conventional sense. Could this be it - the Apocalypse, the end, and not with Hell either victorious or defeated, but simply rendered irrelevant and obsolete, like a horse-and-buggy when compared to the brand-new Bentley still waiting for Crowley somewhere outside of London?
Crowley wondered if a similar plan was in effect somewhere that would have a parallel effect on Heaven. Humans being humans, a good part of him hoped this was so, but he very strongly doubted it.
***
Please pause just a moment, if you will, for a last tale from an insignificant chronicler. The best I can hope for is that my account will languish eternally unread in the library of the Silver City, and its overdue fines will be beyond even Heaven’s accounting.
I am Shakziel, the Angel of Water Insects. I serve my Lord and Creator in a small and well-defined domain. Long have I loved my work, for it is a tiny and busy and orderly microcosm of Creation. And long and happily have I served the lord of my choir, the regal and glorious Rampel, Angel of Mountains and the Ocean Depths.
Many are the angels who occupy themselves with the business of Man. My Lord Rampel is attuned to those spaces our Father made where men never are, where they cannot survive long, which contain Mysteries that are last to be documented by our Father’s most curious children. It is to the domain of Rampel that our kind retires when we most desire clarity and peace.
In days of old, it was rare indeed to see my lord troubled. Lately it is not so, not at all.
I see in him a weight and a dimming. When Rampel returns from his airless alpine domains, he is tense and pale, and when he returns from the lightless depths, he often looks exhausted and, once, I am terrified to say, wounded.
I know of nothing my Creator has made that could or would harm him. Even the biting flies I allow to feed upon me with such profound love would never touch him.
It began to lead me towards the beginnings of a most blasphemous thought, and a thought so horrible as to begin to rend the immortal fibres of my very sanity. If I did not think my extinction imminent in the battle that is coming, I would not even dream of committing this to writing, and my quill would refuse the deed in my very hand.
What if my lord Rampel was wearied in struggles with entities that Our Creator did not make?
***
Paris, 1937
Travel was becoming more and more uncivilised, Aziraphale thought as he clutched his threadbare suitcase close and hustled through the train station. Of course, the French had always been so. He chided himself for an uncharitable thought for a people who had been so badly battered by war, and then promptly forgot about it, since there were pastries to eat, wine to drink, and, fortunately, cathedrals to visit that had survived the war --so far.
Perhaps some minor miracles could be of help. A bit of divine ecstasy could hardly go amiss, could it?
Along the Seine, he could almost pretend there had been no war at all. The lovers and the cafe layabouts looked a little the worse for wear, but no less insouciant for all that. (He tried to put the memory of that night at the Moulin Rouge with Crowley out of his mind, but alas, the absinthe had had the opposite effect on him that it did on most humans; try as he might, he remembered everything.)
He'd never quite managed to acclimate himself to French bread, however. Its crust was too much work for the slight reward the inside provided. Fortunately, where there was water, there were ducks. There were always ducks.
One of them opened its beak, not to eat, but to talk.
Aziraphale, it said in Enochian, Otto Rahn is the hound of Himmler. He's a romantic. If you met him at any other time, you'd like him. More's the pity. How have you missed it? He's been tearing up the south of France, digging up the Cathars, looking for the Grail. Well, you needn't worry about that. Rampel tells me dark things are stirring in Tibet. A member of Ernst Schäfer's expedition was carried from the side of a mountain by a creature with loathsome rubbery wings that gibbered and shrieked as they approached a certain cave where the Yeti is said to live, and the Sherpas panicked and would go no further. The Germans went on inside.
Rahn will go to Iceland. Thule. He will search for the drowned continent, the roots of ancient things beneath the frozen sea. They want to wake the Old Gods, Aziraphale. They think they will get Wotan and Thor, maybe. That is not what they will get.
The duck looked around nervously. Its fellows, unpossessed by the angelic, swam obliviously and quacked for more bread. Use any means necessary, Aziraphale. You can't stop the war between humans. You might be able to stop the war that could destroy us all.
The duck ruffled its wings, with a signature flash of supernatural pattern that Aziraphale recognised as, just as the note said, Shakziel. Then it returned to placid, untroubled essence of pure duckhood.
Aziraphale sighed and wondered if the trains would improve further east. He doubted that, very much.
***
He hadn't realized how far into the belly of the beast he had yet to go.
It turned out that the growing virus was a lot more than political slogans and a costume. There were archaeologists. Historians. Archivists. Booksellers. Publishers. Researchers. Explorers. And they were seeking to undermine the very surface of the modern world itself. Turning up his metaphorical collar against the metaphorical cold, Aziraphale just had to follow the path of stirred-up dust and ancient bones and strange statuettes and barbarous writings in forgotten alphabets. Watch the rising growth of disturbing, far-offscale-of-human architecture. And discover, to his shuddering lack of surprise, that such a path always coincided with a rise in murders and suicides, of clerks and assistants institutionalised and chittering idiotically, filling endless ledger books with nonsensical screeds of terror.
Even his last-ditch attempt to secure information in a city that was still relatively lovely--Vienna--was foiled by another member of the booksellers' fraternity, a bad-tempered hunchback named Ernst Pretzsche. Competition Aziraphale could handle quite well, veiled or unveiled threats were of no great consequence to him. What he really could not abide was not the unpleasant nature of Pretzsche's clientele or collections either--it was really, when it came down to it, the smarmy social climbing and what Aziraphale really, really preferred not to believe were sexual advances.
What he gleaned from his few ventures among Pretzsche's piles of dust, notes, and mold led him to conclude -- with the aid of a few calculations that would be understood only by a few exiles, one shell-shocked Great War veteran dribbling in a sanitorium, and a few people not yet born--that, like it or not (and he did not like it) he was honour-bound to be Berlin bound. He'd never liked Berlin much. It was so, so, well, German. So for the time being, he would have to be as well.
More than once, as he schmoozed his way into darker and darker places, he sent metaphysical feelers out for the traces of his counterpart's hand in all of this. There was nothing strong, nothing conclusive, although once in Berlin, he was sure he could sense Crowley. Somewhere. Not terribly active. Aziraphale nibbled his manicured nails in nerves as his own slightly dubious ways of opening doors for himself began to accumulate and weigh on him.
What was the point of having an Arrangement if one didn't have a guarantee that one's own elaborate bendings of one's moral code didn't have a counterweight to straighten them out again?
Well, nevermind. Toward the end of 1937, as the snow and icy rain began to fall, it was becoming very clear that all the dark energy - the very points of the hooked cross revolving around their own centre like a hurricane--were turning towards Austria once again. And Austria was turning round to face it.
His counterpart had perceived the same psychic weather patterns.
Vienna, 1938
Crowley’s natural response when dealing with the vertiginously jarring was, at least when on earth, rather human: hysterical, side-stitching laughter. It was hardly the effect Aziraphale wanted, but in truth, the angel found it rather a relief. This particular effort of disguise and blending in was giving him such an existential rash that his body had actually contracted by imperceptible molecules in an involuntary attempt to avoid too much intimacy with the costume.
Finally, between painful gasps and the occasional undignified snort that called to mind a sort of reptilian pig, Crowley managed to straighten out his body and regain his speaking faculties. “When I said you needed to catch up with modern fashion, this wasn’t what I had in mind,” he finally sputtered. He tapped his chin contemplatively, “Black is not your colour. Although…the runes are a nice touch. Does it make you itch? I thought angels were allergic to irony.”
“It is necessary. For the time being,” Aziraphale said icily, in flawless Viennese-accented German.
“Well, before you ask,” Crowley hiccupped, “It does not make your arse look fat. Quite the reverse. And the boots are very sharp. Did you polish them yourself or find an Untermensch to do it?”
“CROWLEY!” Aziraphale barked, rising to his full height behind the desk. “I did not allow you to find me so you could point out to me in excruciating detail how ill-suited I am to the uniform of the Third Reich. I did so because this is not a mere matter of human war. Now, I’m rather ashamed to admit this, but some time ago, I was asked by my, ahem, superiors to investigate a certain holy relic once in the possession of Napoleon, which had since fallen in among the treasures of the Habsburgs, and been of great interest for some time to, er, the Fuhrer. Had I undertaken this research ten years ago, I probably could have done so without the sartorial abomination and rather clunky cover story…”
“I’m still trying to figure out how you passed the blood-purity test.”
“My capacity for minor miracles in socially awkward situations is being sorely tested, I must admit…”
“Have you had to make any sperm donations for the Fatherland yet? That'd be something. The Nephilim of Niflheim. How'd you get out of that? I mean, if someone were to accuse me of being Juden I’d just drop my trousers, but…”
“CROWLEY. You are not showing this situation the proper gravity. And why are you blushing and fidgeting so?”
“Because everything you say in German while dressed like that sounds like you’re ordering me to get on my knees.”
“Darling, I know you’re doing your best to be civil, but right now, you’re profoundly rude.”
Crowley just thrust his hips out a little further and said, “You have to understand the way I am, Mein Herr.”
“Oh, I assure you I do, dear boy, you’re the very essence of degenerate art. But as far as I know, we are not here to argue National Socialist sexual mores. Why is your side involved? Tell me now.”
Crowley suddenly sat up straight-still aroused but more challenged-and told Aziraphale honestly, “As far as I know…there is no official word. Yet. But I have been contacted, just, shall we say, under the table.”
"Does no one do anything any other way these days?"
"I have to confess I'd rather like you to do me on the table."
Aziraphale arched an eyebrow in a manner that, on anyone else in the world, might have been described as fiendish. "Are you trying to tell me that you won't tell me anything unless I, er, interrogate you?"
"Now that you mention it, no, you're right! I won't! You'll have to!"
Aziraphale pulled up a sturdy chair behind the desk and tapped impatiently on its surface with the riding crop that served no purpose except it went with the ensemble. Typical Nazis. All crop and no horse. "Well, I suppose we'll have to get this done with, since otherwise you'll be pestering me for interrogation at a far less convenient time in this little adventure."
"I'll probably do that anyway, Mein Herr."
"You can keep calling me that too."
"Whatever you say, Herr Oberfickführer Engel of the Ahnenerbe..."
How did you know I was in the Ahnenerbe?"
"What else would you be?"
Aziraphale had Crowley's number on this insufficient level of insubordination by now. If there were a dictionary for such things, next to "mouthy bottom" there'd be a picture of Crowley. (And in Berlin in the 20s, there had been, and there was.)
"Shut up and crawl over here," Aziraphale ordered. And Crowley's smirk completely vanished.
In a blink, Crowley was on his knees at Aziraphale's feet, hands trembling as if they barely dared to touch his tall, shiny boots. And he wasn't allowed yet - Aziraphale gave his wrist a sharp rap when he tried it.
"Up on the desk," Aziraphale barked, dragging Crowley up by the hair and making sure the demon kept those eyes averted, even when the crop touched his cheek. Aziraphale set it down when it looked like Crowley was in too much danger of being entranced by an object. Roughly, Aziraphale grabbed Crowley's legs and placed them on the arms of his elaborately carved chair, and smiled in satisfaction at Crowley's panting response to find himself nearly in Aziraphale's lap, pinned by a hard blue gaze.
After all, he had been begged to use any means necessary.
For the first time in his new career, he actually drew the dagger he'd found so annoying before. It was sleek and sharp steel, pure functional unpleasantness in an undeniably beautiful package. He smiled. "So tell me, English spy, what have your people told you about the Ahnenerbe?"
"I'll never talk," Crowley lied.
"Really?" said Aziraphale, taking Crowley's shirt in one hand and slicing it open in a clean stroke, cold sharp metal brushing Crowley's chest and belly with the most menacing delicacy.
"No."
"Do you know what the Ahnenerbe is searching for?"
"The roots of the Master Race....ah," Crowley gasped, losing words for just a moment as the cruel blade pressed at his throat.
"And were you sent to find this out?" Aziraphale moved the dagger slowly down, pausing for just a moment at Crowley's chest before chopping open the fine leather belt, can't get that anywhere in Berlin these days except the black market, and through the trousers too, making sure to ever so lightly scratch something very sensitive indeed. Crowley moaned and jerked his hips, not sure whether it was toward or away. With a hiss of his own, Aziraphale squeezed the handle just once and the blade came alive with deep blue flames. "You never really forget how," he said.
Crowley muttered something unintelligible and closed his eyes as Aziraphale pushed his legs further apart, the wreckage of his trousers now gone entirely, and pressed that burning holy heat closer and closer to his vulnerable inner thighs, and his...
"Mugwort!" Crowley gasped. "He's an imp! Underling! Works for Dagon! He said...there was something about submarines. And mountains. And Thule! I don't get it!"
"You'd better," Aziraphale said, palming Crowley's Eier and bringing that light flame within a gnat's breath of die Eichel, which was already straining towards any contact it could get.
"He said....oh fuck, please...it was Himmler. Wants to..."
Aziraphale's hand had moved further back insistently, squeezing and demanding and none too gently pushing with miracle-moist finger into Crowley's Arsch, which offered far less resistance than Poland would up until the Battle of Kock. Crowley writhed and begged further impalement, become rapidly inarticulate in many languages, and tried to use his legs to pull Aziraphale closer until a quick swat on his thigh discouraged that, or at least it tried to, for Crowley was all in favor of swats on the thigh.
Exasperated, Aziraphale tossed the knife over his shoulder and concentrated on his hands--one giving Crowley a clinically sadistic fingering, the other rising up to clamp around his neck. The better to ignore his begging cock with. "Now understand this. I will not allow you to come until you've told me everything I want to know. Do you understand?"
Crowley could barely nod, held pinned, face going flushed then pale, as pleasure and a thrillingly genuine sort of fear made his spine light up with need. He could no more have used his mouth to speak than to swallow a Panzer, but he didn't have to. He could project:
aw yes. please, keep fucking me like that, please, give me more. It's Dagon. Dagon and Hastur. Dagon might go to the Deep Ones and Hastur to the cold reaches of space. Oh fuck. Oh fuck I can't tell if that feels good or it hurts but fuck me, don't stop can't breathe, getting lightheaded. No oxygen where the Elder Gods live, don't use it. Is that the real Root Race? Invented all that blasphemous writing, the ancient scripts. Suicides, murders. SS wantsss it, preciouss. Fuck, please if you don't give me your cock I'm gonna die I swear, I'll find a way to...Filthy rites. Barbaric. Human sacrifice on a massive scale. All to raise up...it'll open the fuck please don't let me breathe I'm gonna...Dungeon Dimensions could open. Oh yeah. Oh yeah right there yes, please, that's all I swear....
"DANKE!" Aziraphale cried and released Crowley's neck, and as the demon gasped for breath, he reached down and seized Crowley's cock with similar force and fire, squeezing and twisting and teasing as Crowley cried out hoarsely and went rigid, releasing sticky white heat all over Aziraphale's impeccable uniform, belt and trousers and, of course, shiny boots.
The angel watched him recover, that slim, twitching body slowly starting to come down to normal, and then grasped his damp dark hair one more time. "And now you'll clean that up, of course."
Slitted pupils still stretched wide, still wearing his savaged shirt, Crowley slithered down off the table and between Aziraphale's legs, addressing with his serpentine tongue everywhere a white stain had a danger of showing up on black, still panting as he traversed the boots' slick surface, and from time to time paused to nuzzle his cheek and his hair, catlike, against Aziraphale's legs. And from time to time Aziraphale deigned to acknowledge this, playing with his slave's hair in an almost tender way, until with a yank he indicated that he desired further service.
Which Crowley attended to with blasphemous gusto. Those black trousers fit so well, it was such an honour to have a chance to undo them. Crowley worked at the clothing for so long that by the time he actually reached Aziraphale's cock, he was so hungry that he sucked it so deep into his throat that his eyes watered and he gave up breathing altogether; any level of sacrifice was worth it to hear the angel's moans and hitching breaths.
***
Later, when Crowley had regained some semblance of dignity and trousers, he still stuck longingly close. Oh dear, Aziraphale thought. I suppose the poor boy must have some issues surrounding demonic hierarchies. We can work on those when all this is over.
"So am I going to have to torment you further to get a discussion of strategy, or will you accept an IOU until we've prevented disaster again?"
Crowley smiled. "I have all the ration cards I need for that, don't I?"
"Excellent. So what you mean to tell me is, that I have more connections, and higher-placed ones, among the SS than you do?"
"That would be about the size of it, yes. Don't I deserve a good whipping for that?"
Aziraphale sighed. The war hadn't even properly started yet, and he could already tell it would be a long one. "Well, this I do know. Both Hitler and Himmler are obsessed with the treasures of the old Holy Roman Empire--which was, of course, none of the above, I can tell you in strict confidence--and in particular, the Heigilische Lance, which is allegedly that of the Roman centurion who pierced the side of Our--well, my--Lord and Saviour. I'm quite sceptical, myself. But we shall see. The relic has acquired a sinister reputation over the centuries and been owned by a tediously long list of long-dead conquerors."
"Overcompensating for something?"
"No doubt. Please raise your thought process a little further above your belt, I think this is important."
"That spear already has a good deal of blood on it, don't you think? Metaphorical and otherwise? Whether it's the real one or not, doesn't it seem like someone whose grip on reality was tenuous to begin with could do a fantastic job of convincing himself it was an object of power?"
Aziraphale nodded. "I blame Wagner, personally. I can't believe you slept so much last century I had to go to the opera by myself. You can't imagine."
Crowley shuddered. "I've heard the recordings. I was in Berlin, remember? You can almost literally hear nothing else."
"Tell me more."
"I didn't tell you the whole truth. Shouldn't I be punished for that? I've been to Nuremberg. You should see the rituals they hold there - or rather, you shouldn't. Those are ones for the masses, of course. They're quite pretty. Buxom frauleins in dirndls and strapping young studs with flags and torches and all that. And I haven't been to Wewelsburg, but I've eavesdropped on some who have. They're practicing some things that are, at the very least, annoying. They've called up a few minor demons and held them for a little while, forced some psychobabble out of them. Let me show you what Mugwort showed me."
Crowley traced a circle and some sigils on the polished surface of the table, and to Aziraphale's eyes, the wood finish dropped away into darkness. A blood-orange moon hung over a deep green, trackless forest, sometimes veiled by cold mist. There was a castle, surrounded by scaffolding.
There had once been a village - quaint and ancient with its gabled roofs and age-blackened timbers, its high, narrow houses leaning together at unwholesome angles above the narrow medieval street with its glistening, moss-slick cobblestones. The familiar sounds of horse-hoof and night-watch faded away as the village began to change--the finer houses strung with the swastika banner, the poor ones cleared away in a muddy jumble of timbers. Flames.
And skinny, hungry-eyed people in ragged coats herded between the stone jaws of the castle walls, down and down into the earth, while torchlight flared on the walls and bloodthirsty, martial drumming and singing came from within, echoing down the slopes of the hill and bouncing off the sides of the valley below.
And then there were screams, as the drumming built to a frenzy, rising into a cacophonous climax played by what sounded like a massive orchestra of idiot automatons, savaging the most violent peaks of, who else?, Wagner.
And then the ground began to shake.
And then the moon changed color, and the sky came alive with loathsome rubbery wings of mountain creatures that should not be, awakened by the noise and enticed by the smell of meat, the herald angels of...what, exactly?
"Poor Mugwort," Aziraphale sighed.
"Poor us. Both your contacts and mine seem convinced we're the only ones who can fix it."
There was a long moment as they both stared at the surface of the table, which had reverted to mere mahogany, immaculate but for the slight prints of Crowley's buttocks still visible, and, for once, not disrupting the chilly aura of terror.
Aziraphale sighed. "You know what this means."
"It means we're going to die?"
"No. It means I have to do research."
***
This is a scene that takes place on the outskirts of Hell.
There is a restless spirit who was once named Dietrich Eckart. He is a footnote of history. He was a playwright - perhaps the Goethe to Hitler's Faust, but with little of the talent. Eckart's true talents lay in mysticism, and ways to twist it. Deep within the Thule Society, he found the key to the purity of the blood. Later, he learned the hard way just how incorrectly he had read it.
There is indeed a Master Race (more than one, in fact). It is not and never will be human. They do indeed predate the coming of men and their gods--all the gods, including the fur-clad warriors of sword and claw.
There are indeed degenerate mongrel races. They are not any entirely-human ethnicity, but the descendants of men and monsters, who shamble around the rotting ruins of once-human villages, in wild and ancient and uncivilised places.
There is an ongoing war among them, far beneath the thin veneer of the young human world. There are dimensions to which the human Hell itself is just a sort of foyer or cloakroom. In this world, the embodiment of War wears no lovely face.
The soul of Dietrich Eckart has glimpsed these dimensions--smelled the fishy musk of the children of Dagon and heard the mad piping of the cold, thin people of Hastur.
He pounds, endlessly, eternally on the gate of the human Hell, desperate for its relative safety. Lucifer himself will not admit him.
***
This is a scene that takes place on Earth, in the land currently called Deutschland.
The German rabble would have been so appalled to learn that there was a Black Man who dictated all of Karl Maria Wiligut's theories.
Wiligut was SO close to Himmler, after all.
But this Black Man was not "black" in the way dark-skinned humans are. He was BLACK in the same way that darkened rooms that make children cry are. He was BLACK like the space in the void where no stars are.
All the spaces in the earth where humans live, where there were tombs and ancient spaces that predated the locals for millennia, that were determined to be too sacred to explore, he was there.
With his hand on Wiligut's and Himmler's shoulders.
He is Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos - in vaguely human form, adept and erudite. And it was he who whispered to all the avatars of the Master Race: “You must have The Spear. It is a relic of the weak, human, jewish "god" we must defeat. Capture it, own it, wield its power to kill millions, and I will make sure you all Ascend, as you deserve.”
***
This is a scene that takes place in a world between the worlds.
AZIRAPHALE. YOU CANNOT STAND AGAINST THIS THREAT.
The more light Aziraphale gathered to himself and emitted, the more furious and blinding his halo and the brighter and faster his wings, the more light that seemed to trail off into fading night, being swallowed by the blackness between the stars in Azrael’s wings.
“I am an angel of the Lord,” he declared in his full voice, as he had so rarely had call to do, and worried that he sounded rusty. As nice it would have been to have his old sword once again, he was beginning to suspect it mightn’t help.
YOU ARE AN ANGEL OF THE LORD OF HEAVEN, THE KNOWN COSMOS AND THE FIXED STARS. THE LORD OF ANGELS AND MANKIND, AND OF ALL THINGS THAT GROW AND WALK ON THE GOOD EARTH. THESE LORDS COME FROM…ELSEWHERE. THEY CARE NOTHING FOR YOU, OR ANYTHING THAT MATTERS TO YOU-OR TO YOUR LORD.
Aziraphale bit his lip, a gesture that still managed to seem heroic when bathed in such light. “And yet…they are still subject to you, are they not?”
The pause that came was long. Entirely too long. Aziraphale could almost hear all the comings and goings…well, mostly goings…delayed in Death’s deliberation. I AM…NOT CERTAIN.
“What?”
WITH STRANGE AEONS, EVEN DEATH MAY DIE.
The fear that passed through Aziraphale then had such a peculiar character of newness that he almost enjoyed it. For millennia he had believed there was only One who could defeat Death, and that One was firmly on the side he thought of as his. But to learn there were realms beyond…well, it gave him vertigo in five dimensions.
“What do you think I should do, then?”
I THINK YOU SHOULD RUN.
Aziraphale’s silence was long. He wasn’t as good at it as Death, but he was motivated to try. Finally, he sighed, “And where exactly do you suggest I run to?”
Death’s silence was of a different type than before.
“That’s what I thought,” said Aziraphale. His shoulders slumped. And then straightened. He might be outranked, outpowered, and outnumbered, but he would bloody well not be outwitted.
***
With the Anschluss, and the unpleasantly giddy and flower-strewn absorption of Austria into the Third Reich, came a certain sense of urgency. There was now nothing standing between Hitler and the treasure in the museum but a flair for delayed gratification in the name of theatrics. Not to mention an extended round of untranslatable neener-neener directed at those who hadn't recognised the Führer's Very Special Destiny early enough.
Aziraphale would really have preferred not to have to skulk about in the darkened corridors of the treasure house like a common jewel thief. He would have preferred not to have to freeze time--and well-armed guards--with a flash of officious Nazi uniform frippery designed to say nothing but I outrank you, and a rather awkward salute that fixed the hypnotised gazes. Whatever those guards were dreaming about, it probably wasn't what they liked best.
"Well. There it is," said Crowley, staring at the object.
"Indeed," said Aziraphale.
"And you didn't investigate this twenty years ago when it was just a museum piece."
"I was busy, Crowley. The war and all."
"You were busy doing what? Knitting warm socks for the boys at the front? Sending them boxes of uplifting literature?"
"I'm an angel of peace."
"Says the angel wearing the SS uniform."
"Says the demon who follows my every command while I'm wearing it."
"Well, when we get out of here, I insist on having my turn to wear it."
"You've never shown any interest in borrowing my clothes before," Aziraphale said acidly. "Well, enough banter, old boy. Shall we find out the truth?"
"Let's."
With a shared resolute glance, they stepped forward towards the box together.
It was Crowley who reached out his hand first, and so it was Crowley who first yelped in pain and fell backwards as if struck in the chest by a firehoselike force.
Aziraphale bent to make sure he wasn’t too badly hurt, and the brush of his palm healed a stinging burn. Crowley's eyes, watering, opened wide. "Crowley, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Aziraphale babbled. "It's real, isn't it?"
"No fucking shit, Sherlock, it's real. I can't touch it. Blood of....ow, fuck."
Standing up, shaking, Aziraphale approached, reached out his hand and tried not to flinch, trying his blessedest to believe in the holiness.
The same thing happened to him. As he climbed up on his elbows slowly and gave Crowley his palm for the healing breath, he stared up at the box in trembling terror. "Bloody hell!" he gasped. "I can't touch it either!"
"But...a holy relic...you should?"
"It's unholy too. Constantine, Charlemagne, Barbarossa....every single conqueror who touched it steeped it in black magic, cruelty, the blood of innocents, lust for power, corruption of the Word and the Church to earthly ends, greed, hubris..."
"And if Hitler gets it?"
"Eckart was right. Rampel was right. And...sounds like your man in between down below was right. If he has it...if he uses the blasphemous rites, if he goes to the forbidden places and commits human sacrifice on a big enough scale..."
"Then it was nice knowing you, human world?"
"It's possible. I didn't believe it was but...it really is."
"Well." Crowley leaned back, taking in the stiff, regal hush of the museum, the frozen shadows of the silent guards, the pounding in his head from the marching feet, the shouts, the flowers of all things, the stifling heat wave of paranoia and hatred and overwhelming lust for abstract concepts that had emanated from the martially-guarded cars of Himmler and the Führer himself--those things always translated into horrific violence when humans wanted them that badly. And terrible architecture. Although he did like the Autobahn.
Funny old world, he thought. Will we be around to miss it? Or will those...Things...devour the demons and angels first? He leaned back, still aching, and his hand brushed Aziraphale's, and with it came an idea.
"Angel," he said.
"Yes?"
"If I can't touch it because it's too holy...and you can't touch it because it's too cursed....well, maybe, do you think? I mean sometimes, when you and I are...well..." The shyness took him by as much surprise as anyone.
"Fucking?"
"Right here? Now?"
"No! I mean, that's what you mean isn't it?"
"Yes. Well, sometimes, it's as if, I feel you. On a different level. If you understand...oh, I don't know why this is so awkward for me."
"Maybe I do," Aziraphale said, "Go on."
"Anyway...it's as though we, er, coexist. But on a different frequency than we usually do, if you take my meaning, and I mean, since I don't hurt you and you don't hurt me--unless of course I ask you to--then maybe there's something in us that balances, or neutralises..."
"So you think perhaps we could pick it up together?"
"If we're very precise, then maybe. It might complete a circuit."
Aziraphale and Crowley looked at the Spear, and then at each other. "Or fry us both."
"Well," said Crowley, shrugging. "At least we'll have tried."
They kept looking at each other. "Well, let's not dawdle then," said Aziraphale, climbing to his feet slowly and holding out a hand to help Crowley up. Crowley took it.
They kept their hands clenched as they approached the box and stood over the long blade, one on each side. "It's been nice...knowing you. Getting to know you. In every sense. Er."
"Thank you Crowley. The feeling is mutual, I assure you. All of them. Um."
The pause stretched and stretched, past even the limits of Wagnerian musicology. "Alright, now," said Crowley, his voice startlingly high and cracked. "One."
"Two."
"Three." As their hands shot forward as one to take the blade, an impulse of Crowley's other arm that bypassed his brain entirely reached out and grabbed Aziraphale's hair and pulled him in for a rough, needy, half-missed kiss. Both of them froze, held in place by waves that felt electrical, both keeping their hands around that thing that felt so nasty, that hurt, that gave them flashes of things abhorrent and agonising; terrible memories and future terrors; Falling endlessly, rising up to nothingness, being blinded by the Light and swallowed forever in the Dark.
It took an excruciating amount of time for them to lift the thing just a few inches, just long enough for Aziraphale to pull that old papal robe that Hitler would never notice missing from a nearby case and let it wrap the thing.
"Now drop it," Aziraphale murmured into Crowley's mouth. As long as they kept their lips together, it would work. "One."
"Two."
"Three."
With a thump far heavier than it should have been, the brocaded bundle plunged to the floor and lay there as if it were a mere inanimate object. Crowley and Aziraphale were wheezing from exertion, leaning on each other and looking at the Spear with matching expressions of horrified revulsion.
"How...how could that thing even be?" Crowley whispered.
"I don't like this century at all so far. Not one bit," Aziraphale complained.
"All right, now what? What do we do with it?"
"I'm worried about taking it away, honestly. I don't want to imagine what Hitler will do if he knows it's gone missing."
"He doesn't have to know. Let me be devious for a change, all right? My ego needs it." Crowley reached over, a mite impishly, and drew the dagger at Aziraphale's waist. With a grin, he spun it rakishly on his fingertip, and as it spun, it lengthened, dulled, complexified, and darkened until it was a flawless copy of the ancient spearpoint. "Now, let him have it," he said and dropped it back where the Spear had been with a disrespectful plink.
"Very devious, my dear," said Aziraphale, eye a-twinkle.
"I am, aren't I? You should let me show it off more," Crowley leered.
"Ought to be just magical enough to make a sensitive human feel something, too. Well done."
"At this stage, Hitler would have rapturous fits over a butter knife if he thought it would give him power."
"That still doesn't answer the fundamental question, does it?"
"No. Should we destroy it? I want to. I really, really don't like it."
"I don't either. But we haven't the right. I'm afraid we'd have to answer for that."
Crowley shivered.
***
Back at Crowley's hotel suite, the offending item tucked safely away in a trunk, Aziraphale sat down on the bed, boots propped up on a footstool, and put his head on his hands on his knees. "You asked about the lads from the Great War. I did minister to some of them, you know. The ones who came back wounded, and...not right...and just ill. Stayed in touch with some."
"The bookish ones? Or the handsome ones?"
Aziraphale gave him a scathing look.
"The ones who were both, then. Do go on - if there's a point."
"There is one fellow - he's at Oxford now. Rather too fond of fairy tales, if you ask me, but he's done well for himself. He has a very, very large...manuscript. Anyhow, he said that it came to him once in a tale that if one has a very powerful and dangerous object to get rid of, it's best to entrust it to the one with the least use for it or interest in it."
"So not that Yank archaeologist with the whip, then?"
"Goodness no. He's gone off after the Grail anyway. Won't see him again for a while, if ever. Any other ideas?"
Crowley scrunched up his face and stared off into the middle distance of hazy memories. "I knew a man in Berlin...Pfirsich Rommel, yes, the general's brother, but he was a pretty little flamer with no more interest in war than an eggplant has. I don't think he'd take it, though. It wouldn't match anything he owns."
"It can't stay in Austria, or Germany, or Europe at all. It wouldn't be safe."
"That's the problem with a World War, isn't it?" Crowley had the thousand-yard stare, broken only when Aziraphale's eye was struck by something in Crowley's luggage.
"This hardly seems your usual style," Aziraphale mused as he pulled out a frilly silk negligeé.
"That's an object of Nazi fetish power too," Crowley confessed. "Used to belong to Richard Wagner himself."
***
Aziraphale and Crowley would hardly have chosen to make their run for it in the middle of a riot, but what with politics as they were, they were given little choice. Aziraphale just walked, ramrod-straight, as if he owned the place. The costume was, at least, a help in this regard. As he dragged Crowley along, Crowley couldn’t help but notice that even the hakenkreuz on the angel’s arm seemed to turn and writhe as if it wasn’t comfortable either. Serves it right, Crowley thought wildly.
They almost made it through without incident.
Almost.
Violent riots get some people’s blood up; the sound of breaking glass and paving stones hitting bones touches a certain electrical nerve in the wiring of the brains of a certain type of young man who would have cursed God had he been born in a time of peace. This type claims patriotism and longing for glory, and may even superficially believe it; what they truly long for, though, is gore and fury, adrenalin and chaos, and an entire lifetime lived in an instant, crammed chock full of random horror.
“What’s this then?” snarled the first thug, probably too young to have been original SA but certainly evil enough. He fixed blazing eyes of pure bloodlust on Crowley.
“Prisoner,” Aziraphale said, doing his best to sound imperious. It would have worked in Hell. It didn’t work here.
“Off to Dachau, then?” snarled the thug’s companion-bigger and older and orders of magnitude dumber, making up for it in sheer hatred. “What is he, commie?”
“Fag?” leered the other.
“Aw, sir, don’t ship him off. Let us have fun with him here. Give the enlisted boys a little party, eh?” Big and Thick leaned in closer. “Ach, bet he’s Juden. You can tell by the snake eyes.”
“I’m not,” Crowley managed to hiss as they moved in closer. “I can prove it.”
Aziraphale made a warning sound, though he wasn’t sure whom he was trying to warn, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The chaos was in the air, and it was beginning to affect his counterpart, whose demonic aura was expanding and congealing to the point where it nearly hurt the angel to hold his arm. Any attempts at conveying, Please, my dear, don’t embarrass me, were doomed to fall on deaf ears-after all, Serpents don’t, technically speaking, hear anything. They feel vibrations. And they can snap in a moment when they sense a threat or the resonance of prey--ideally, both.
Quick as a strike, Crowley’s hands were free and opening his belt. “See, boys, it’s still got its hood on!”
What came out of his trousers was long, black, sinuous, quick, and indeed, hooded-arching and swaying its piercing-eyed, scaled head. The brownshirts squeaked and quailed as it pondered which one to strike first, and then nailed them both, one, two, in the blink of an eye. Blood and venom (and soil in the trousers) and they both clenched the fang marks on their swelling hands as they fell to the glass-littered ground, writhing and foaming at the mouth.
“Don’t worry, it’s easy to change it back,” Crowley muttered as a pale, shocked Aziraphale dragged him away.
“I am never letting you put that thing in me again,” Aziraphale muttered.
It was Crowley’s turn to go pale. “You scare too easily….”
“So do you,” Aziraphale smirked. “And you’re gullible where sex is concerned. Now can we please get through this city without any more fatalities or transformations?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Those weren't fatalities, though. They're just having memorable hallucinations.”
"So Hell does have a sense of mercy."
"If you want to call it that."
As they continued their escape, Crowley could ever-so-quietly be heard to sing, "So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu..."
***
History does not record the number of ducks that disappeared from continental Europe in the months and years immediately prior to the full escalation of World War II. Understandably, such a thing might be missed by humans, who were rather preoccupied at the time. The truth is, the number is much higher than can be explained by migration patterns, coincidence, or even habitat destruction. Which leaves, really, only one possibility. They must have been warned.
***
The rage of Hastur and Dagon was great, and Rampel flew far to escape it. He looked down with some relief as he passed over the ghastly, windswept plain of Leng, which hides among the highest mountains of the world. The barbarous inhabitants were no more (or no less) barbarous than usual, and with gratitude the Angel of the High Places left them behind, soaring ever higher, past the yaks and goats, and up to cold and pure airless realms where no bird can fly.
***
This will be my last attempt at writing anything down for a very long time, if not forever. I, Mugwort, have been condemned to that cold place outside of Hell where the mad are kept--those who were not sentient enough to do true evil, but nonetheless harmed others in their frenzies. This may be the safest place I can be, though wherever I go, there I am, and I would prefer to be anyone at all who has not these memories I do. It's not so horrifying that some sought to overthrow Lucifer himself--it's in the nature of demons. It's that they would never have thought of it were it not for the humans, and someday, they will replace us. We are not what we thought we were. They're better at it.
***
AZIRAPHALE AND CROWLEY. I MUST ADMIT. I AM IMPRESSED. AND, TRUTH BE TOLD, RELIEVED.
"Relieved?" Crowley said quizzically, gazing up into Azrael's twinkling sockets as the Angel of Death beat his great wings over the moonlit Alps.
YES. PART OF ME IS NOT READY FOR ALL THIS - he made a gesture that encompassed the world-- TO END. LEAST OF ALL MYSELF.
"Yes, well, I'm afraid you'll still get a good deal of exercise," Aziraphale said regretfully. "Nothing we've done will stop him, exactly."
THAT IS JUST AS WELL FOR YOU. MY SIBLINGS WOULD NOT BE PLEASED IF YOU COST THEM THEIR, ER, LIVELIHOODS.
"But isn't that...what I'm supposed to do?" Aziraphale said, his voice startlingly small. Death might have blinked when Crowley put his arm around the angel's shoulder, if he'd had eyelids.
YOU DID WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO DO. YOU BOTH DID. YOU SAVED IT ALL FROM SOMETHING WORSE. AND YOU ENABLED THE GAME TO CONTINUE.
"I suppose that's it, then," said Crowley, rather subdued, as he and Aziraphale handed him the glittering bundle of medieval fabric and terror. Together of course - even wrapped, neither wanted to touch it without the other.
WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO WITH THIS?
"We don't expect you to do anything with it," Aziraphale said. "We know you don't need it."
"I think we hope you'll do exactly nothing with it," Crowley clarified.
HM. WELL, THANK YOU, I SUPPOSE. NOW I SUGGEST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO GET ANY DIRTIER, YOU SHOULD RETURN TO ENGLAND. THEY WILL NEED YOU THERE...WELL, AS MUCH AS ANYONE EVER DOES.
"Thank you very much for your help."
With a chilly wave, Death was gone. Possibly to see if he could fit in a nap before the storm broke.
As he flew through the icy night around the poles of the earth, he admired the cool placidity of the Antarctic mountains. Such a beautiful place, and mysterious yet to him; nothing lived there, so nothing died there either, and he'd had little cause to visit.
It occurred to him that that wasn't a bad place to keep something both dangerous and useless, and if he'd ever have cause to come back, he could pick it up again. He doubted he would. He doubted it would matter. With a satisfied grin (different somehow from his usual) he let it drop to the glaciers below.
Just before the Spear hit the snow, something that a sane person would probably fail to describe accurately scuttled out from the rock and caught it in its savage maw, and continued on its way. It was a horror from a world beyond.
It was a steamer trunk of sapient pearwood that ran about on dozens of legs.
~end~
Vulgarweed's Writer's Notes
Quantum Witch's Artist's Notes
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