[Suzerain of Sheol]

Time crawls as the Crown streaks away through the blasted aperture in the wall. It clears the monastery, trailing white like minute rents in the span of the planes, tumbling end-over-end in a dazed milky descent.

At the same time, Father Jethro lurches upright in his bed, a jolted reaction to sudden, immanent consciousness. His eyes, manic, see everything that has transpired in the appalled chamber, but he comprehends nothing. Prolonged by disturbed enunciation, his mouth stretches in an agonized rictus, preamble to a scream, but no sound issues forth.

In fact, all sound in the chamber - the death-whines of the Hounds, Sin's guttural, sadomasochistic groans, the heave of breath in the survivors and the roar of fire - ceases. Chokes. For a pristine instant, there is silence.

And the world ripples.

Amid the carnage, possibilities collide and reality implodes, a vacuous presence emerging in a wavering black slit that wrenches outward in every direction, expanding into a sphere of crackling midnight. And within, an inferno roars, coalescing flames of argent and red-gold, straining at the walls of the natal space until it splits apart from the impossible pressure of Heaven's fire.

A Gate opens, and someone steps through.

He does not touch the monastery floor, floating aloft spared the arrogant contrivance of angelic wings, shedding refulgent trails of light from his down-turned feet. Every inch of his body is sheathed in golden armor, hammered adamant inscribed with mysterious prayers. From his crested helm spring the tri-fold horns of Zagzagel in effigy, wrought of flame-crowned bronze. His face is covered by an irenic mask of celestial dispassion, its golden perfection broken only by two abyssal pin-points where eyes might linger. A jagged halo of gray sparks and violet embers encircles his head. In his right hand, the Iron Scepter of Morning thrums like the resonance of night itself.

The Celestrine Himself has come to wage Heaven's War.

He holds the Scepter before him, and addresses the Hell-Mother.

"O alienate from God, O spirit accurst, forsaken of all good. I saw thy fall determined, and thy hapless crew involved in this perfidious fraud, contagion spread both of thy crime and punishment. Henceforth, no more be troubled how to quit the yoke of God's Messiah: those indulgent Laws will not now be vouchsafed. Other Decrees against thee are gone forth without recall..."

He ascends until he is level with Sin's rent head. Still, only the pulsating hymn of his voice of Power can be heard. Nothing else moves.

"That Golden Scepter which thou didst reject is now an Iron Rod to bruise and break thy disobedience. The wrath impendent, raging into sudden flame distinguish not: for soon expect to feel His Thunder on thy head, devouring fire. Then who created thee lamenting learn, when who can uncreate thee thou shalt know!"

Existence lurches once more, and chaos detonates across the monastery tower. A hazardous, fulgurating dome of power shines from the Scepter's tip, and Sin reels from the preying light. She quivers and gestates before the party's eyes. Her hundred wombs split open once more, belching floods of noxious amniosis and an uncountable multitude of writhing membranous birthing sacs. They strain and tear themselves open, giving birth to a seeming infinity of hellish vipers, these a dozen and more times the size of the ones they fought earlier. Millions at a time, they coil and launch themselves at the Celestrine and his corona of flaying power. The entire monastery shakes at their weight as they spring.

And they die. As though colliding head-first with a wall of lightning, the serpents are annihilated, their own momentum carrying them to ashen destruction as they plunge into the killing nexus that surrounds the Lord of Thyati'ra. Sin's children perish in impossible numbers, and each one is a knife of agony in her spirit. She trembles and claws at herself, rips out her own organs in insane protest and denial, crushes her many hearts in hands of helpless maternal rage.

And the Celestrine is not yet done.

Floating even nearer, he raises the terrible Scepter and brings it down upon her skull.

Like the fist of God himself.

And again.

Again.

Again.

Sin howls. Thrashes. A hostage to her own immortality. Her unholy Father could not be slain, but the wounds of Michael's sword have laid him low. An Empyrean scourging. And as was done to the Father, the Celestrine does now to the Daughter. Essential things crack and splinter with each blow, that monstrous skull further ruined by savage smitings that she is powerless to ward. Furrows are gouged through her gangrenous brain, charred eternities of anguish that will forever burn through spiritual synapses. The Sentence of Hell is renewed at his hand.

And to the astonished group, even as he sets about his judgment, Zaccheus speaks but a single word:

"BEGONE."