[Suzerain of Sheol]

Fixed on the creature Na'lsa, Diogenes snarls at Dante's words.

"What would you have me do? There are no angels to spirit this fallen flesh to blissful rest. A cairn in Hell is hypocrisy enough to make Satan himself weep amid his death throes in bitter laughter. I don't suppose you've sunfire on hand to blast those titanium bones to ash?

Let the heretic rot."

Struck by a sudden realization, he diverts his attention from the demon to kneel beside the priest's body and roughly rolls him onto his back, exposing the devastated ruin of his face. Gripping the neck of the robe, he sends a jolt of psychic force to his muscles and violently tears the kevlar apart, revealing the armored vest beneath.

And secured in the top-most compartment, the Ordinance Transceiver entrusted to the priest. Diogenes takes it and secures it on his own person.

As he is about to rise, something strikes him. Ethereal, ephemeral, an instinct, a sensation, a revelation.

This.

Is.

Not.

Real.

Something not himself speaks the word aloud.

A voice echoing from nowhere, omnipresent, crushing, sibilant. An ancient sound, bound with authority, bound with the majesty of Hell, cacophonous with inconceivable potentials, unthinkable atrocities. Beautiful. Rapturous. Erotic.

And the world falls away.

Gone is the asylum, the carcasses of the vipers, the ashes of the angel. Gone the strange stars above.

They stand once more in daylight, in the barrens of Smyrna, inside the Abbot's chamber in the monastery tower. It was built for luxury, for opulence, velour carpets in crimson, stretching from one corner fifty feet and more to the other, now tattered, stained, faded, moth-eaten.

Against the far wall, surrounded by the mauled corpses of a dozen monks, stands the Abbot's bed, draped with sable shrouds, nested in a frame of tarnished gold. A strange coalescence of power, like dusted pearls, exudes from the ivory crown upon his brow.

But he is irrelevant, insignificant, to the other occupant of the chamber, circling the room in obese coils, sheathed in oiled scales like feathers of nauseous gray: a serpent. Hundreds of feet long, bloated impossibly and leaking rank blood and... smoke... from what appear dozens of wombs in the grotesque heaps of her flesh. The shapes of unholy things writhe visibly within, bulging and deforming her body.

And at the head, looming over the priest's rest, where the scales taper away, is the torso of a woman like a statue carved by hallucinating angels. Knotted clumps of night-dark hair fall in torrents down over an inhuman skull. She has no flesh, and maggots crawl across the necrotic tissue of her face, into the pits of her eyes. Long arms of dull, bare bone fall from warped shoulders, jointed at impossible angles. Her ribs jut outward, stretched taut with spidery tissue and tumescent veins, laying bare a pit of obscene organs within.

Seeing the party, a horrific smile splits her features, and she spreads her arms in welcome.

Again, the voice comes, haunting, appallingly dulcet, the song of a profane muse. ""All the Host of the Heaven recoiled, and called me SIN. His own begotten daughter."

Rippling with vulgar motion, heaving, excreting blood and bane, she extends herself closer to the group, her words assaulting them like the cataracts of Hell. "And see what I hath become,accursed and driv'n out from the palace of my Father.I once held in troth the Tarterian Key itself,to open the Adamantine Gates and so release Hell in all its terror upon thy world. But he came, the glorious one, Adonis, the Scepter'd One, Beelzebub, and did wrest it from my grasp. I have been usurped, unable to avenge Michael's regicide upon my father. I am hunted by demons, hated by Heaven, and the nightmare of every man."

And then she sees, the slavering form of Na'lsa on the ground far below. And her smile widens.

"Oh, my beautiful son...."