To anyone else, it might have been a nice night. If Bezel could stop to admire the cricket song or the spring breeze, he might have once enjoyed it, but he knew he couldn't. Not only did he lack the attention to detail require to stop and smell the roses, but there was something else much more important.

He had to open the gate.

"Ba'al, will you please slow down!" Mayvalt panted from behind him. Her usually graceful stride had lost pace beneath her frenzied panic. She stumbled through the forest, slapping aside branches and bugs. The bright strands of hair curled around the base of her antlers were a shimmering mint green in the softening spring moon.

The moon.

"The wall will be weakest during the full moon, I have to open it now before I lose my chance." Bezel said over his shoulder.

The glossy italian leather of his dress shoe sunk into a puddle of watery mud, for one split second halting his feverish hike. Well, it didn't matter. He was close now. He glanced ahead of himself and blinked his well-adapted cat eyes. So close. He could almost register the draw of it, little flies whistling in his ears from another milky-way.

"Why do it at all?" Mayvalt called. "You're stretching yourself too thin, boss. You have seven gates already--the Faun are content. The runaway wolves are so incredibly grateful for your assistance in harbouring their fugitive furry hides. What else do you need? Stop turning the Trammel into swiss cheese!"

"I. . ." what did he need? Nothing. He never tired, he never starved, he never suffocated, he never longed-- not even for the thing he required most. He had no desire at all.

No, it wasn't need. It was knowing. Deep from the cage of his ribs; this gate must be opened.

"Mayvalt, dear, all that bleating will attract a hungry wolf." He said plainly.

"Boss!" She snapped, "fine, what would you have me say? That I'm worried? That I don't care about you at all? Go ahead and bleed yourself dry--but for one single second will you please stop and consider the rest of us! If you punch enough holes in the wall, eventually someone will come to fix it. You're going to garner Elysium's attention. I believe you recall the last time their attention was grabbed. The Demon-Born war!"

Bezel froze, and Mayvalt sighed a heavy tone of relief. "Okay, thank you, boss. We left the car a few miles back, but I can-"

"It's here, Mayvalt."

"W-what?" She whispered.

He lifted his hand, pointing out across the still water. For as far as his bewitched eyes could see, there remained nothing but oil black reflections of the bright starry sky. Held by the water, the heart of some giant beast, was the mirrored image of the glistening spring moon.

"This is the spot. I'm going to open it here."

"Here? In the water? What are you even talking about!" She shook her head and sucked in a deep breath, "Boss there are country homes all around this place, Heimrian homes. Whatever you summon here will never even use a gate at the bottom of Lake Seneca!"

"If it'll never be used, I fail to see how the proximity to Heimrian homes matters." Bezel countered coldly.

She stomped her leather boot into the soft dirt and scowled. "Please, Ba'al! When will you just listen to me! Can you even tell me why? What could possibly be driving you! I know it's not your soul--they have nothing to do with this--so why? I'm begging you, Ba'al, please!"

Bezel turned to look at her, his eyes glimmered with fallen moonlight. Her breath trembled in her throat. Her cheeks darkened with red as tears pooled in her eyes. She'd told him something once, a long time ago. About crying, and what he should do if it happened because of him.

"I'm sorry." He said blankly.

"No." She shook her mint-green curls. "Don't say that to me, boss. Never say that to me again. I never want to hear something from you that you don't mean."

He turned back to the lake.

"This might get rough. You should leave."

"I'm not going anywhere."

She was as stubborn as he could be, and he knew he'd only waste his time to argue with her. Bezel nodded and shut his yellow eyes. He tilted his head back, sucking in deep breaths of cooling spring air. He retreated into a place that had long ago gone still. With frozen fingertips, he reached into the well contained in his heart. He snagged a string of magic and began to pull, dragging it out into the space between his ribs.

His skin began to grow hot, flushing with rich olive color. His lungs expanded and his heart trembled with a weak thrumming pulse.

Suddenly, as if a dam had burst, his magic began to pour out of confinement. The rushing tide acted as his blood, filling each centimeter of his body. His tongue stung with anticipated power--but he'd need much more than a simple kiss this time.

Bezel lifted his left arm out before him. He calmly rolled back the sleeve of his button-up shirt, exposing the smooth skin of his wrist.

"Boss, what are you going to do?" She whimpered. "You can't bleed. No Heimrian object, no Avernian weapon, could ever scratch you."

"No, it couldn't." Bezel agreed. "To injure an Ely, you'd need magic from Elysium. I'm unfortunately lacking the power left to create a Vestige, but I have something else. Perhaps a method you know well. Is it not by your own bones that the Progeny kill you?"

"Wh-"

Bezel sunk his blunted teeth into the soft skin of his wrist. He forced his jaws down, until with a sickening crack, the taste of rich iron spilt over his tongue. Mayvalt gasped and buried her face into her flattened palms. Bezel flung his arm out, spreading an arch of cooling blood across the shore of the lake.

Where his power-soaked gore touched the ground, it bubbled and smoldered. The earth began to churn. Thick dark smoke began to rise from the burning grass. Mayvalt whimpered weakly and pressed her nose into the crook of her elbow to ward away the smell of the blood and smoke.

Waves formed in the still black lake. Rapidly rising tides that licked up the burning ground, turning into steam and foam. Encouraged by his wealthy blood, the water swirled up into a rising riptide. The lake twisted in on itself, a vat of live snakes intertwining in a final crushing battle.

The silver reflection of the moon was slashed through and broken by the unrestful lake.

Bezel pressed his palms against his chest. It. . . hurt? No, it didn't. Nothing hurt anymore. So what was this strange feeling? It was as if someone had grabbed hold of his heartstrings and had begun ripping them from the cold dead cave behind his ribs. His magic was leaving him--rushing forward out of some invisible wound.

No, out of the wound he'd carved into himself.

He glanced at the trashing pool--the water sparked, coughing up massive pillars of gray smoke, which sputtered up into the spring sky.

"What's going on, boss?" Mayvalt shouted. 

Her voice carried as softly as mice prayer over the chaos he'd created. She gasped and flung her hands up over her ears as the sky split apart, as the water screamed, and as it all came crashing down.

Boom, boom, boom!

Bezel's legs weakened and he toppled forward, falling onto his hands and knees in the writhing dirt. He gasped back a gulp of unfulfilling air, and curled his fingers into fists. His magic poured down his split wrist, scorching the earth braced beneath his palm.

Everything he'd been pushing out came rushing back, one massive elastic band that had been pressed too far. The winds spiked, the water bubbled, the earth shook--and all his chaos came home. Bezel's spine snapped taunt. Searing heat filled his skin, and boiled his blood. Thousands of pounds of live magic came crashing back down at once, fighting and churning to be the first drop back in the well.

"Boss!"

He might have screamed--but he felt no pain. He couldn't feel anything but his own failure, and the taste of blood from his tongue as his previously blunted fangs pierced it.

Bezel's shoulders dropped, his eyes fluttered, and he did what he no longer thought himself capable of--he stopped. The cruel and unending days departed, and for one split second, Bezel became someone who could shut his eyes.

Until the buzzing became too loud a nuisance to continue to ignore. 

"So all of this mess started here?" Mayvalt asked. 

Which brought him back to now. 

Her question shattered his train of thought. Bezel blinked, slowly readjusting to the present. He'd been torn between a waking dream and his neutral reality since stepping foot in the forest. It helped to look at her; at her frizzy peach-toned curls, her eyes red-rimmed, and cheeks pale and hollowed--and remember that his mistake was not something he was currently living.

"The mess started a long time ago." Bezel corrected. "I just made it worse here." 

She nodded her agreement. Her skin had taken on a sickly sheen since they'd found Savalt a few days ago. As if she was still stuck in that moment, kneeling beside the corpse on the pine carpet. But that wasn't her only difference. Settled against her hair, resting at the bottom of one velvet-kissed antler, was the golden horn cuff she'd gifted to a departed love.

Bezel didn't look at it much--though he didn't know why his cat eyes always seemed to dart away. Only that it seemed that he had ruined much more than a simple summoning spell that night. But he'd ruined a lot in his never-ending life; so it was better to carefully retrace the fragile dominoes he'd tipped over to fully understand. 

The eighth gate. That had been first, the first piece in an artwork of shattered glass. Like all his others, the urge to rip apart the Trammel had suddenly risen up in the back of his skull as an impossible itch. Not exactly feeling--but too solid a thought to just ignore. 

He didn't know why. He had never thought it mattered much. A single destructive hobby. It was his own magic to waste, and his own subjects who benefitted. Or, it had been that way, except now he could easily blame that childish impulse for the mess he was wading through.

Well, he'd only attempted to open a gate. He certainly hadn't succeeded. He'd know if he had. He could nearly feel each rift. How one might feel sores growing along his back. He could never twisted the right way to spot them in the mirror, but he could always detect the seeping sting of them. Parasites feeding off his weakened magical supply. Another reason, Mayvalt loved to point out, that he should stop making gates.

He hadn't listened to her warning, but it hadn't mattered. He'd failed. He knew that, despite what his brother claimed--this gate was not his. So then how? And why lie? What benefit did it carry for Mammon to claim they both owned the gate? There was much more at play here than Bezel could bear. 

"There's really a gate." Mayvalt said. She lowered herself into a crouch and poked at the bank of the lake with the pointed end of a small stick. As if the water itself was something to be roused. 

"Yes, Mayvalt." He repeated blankly. "There's a gate." 

"Did you-" 

"No. I only tried once. You were there. You saw." Bezel shook his head.

She puffed her pink lips up into a frown and tilted her head. "Saw? Boss, I carried you back to the car, okay? Princes--I remember." She stood and tossed her stick into the shallow edges of the lake. "So, if you didn't open this, who did?" 

He paused, mulling over in his mind just how much to share. Mayvalt had never spoken to Mammon--which, Bezel could acknowledge, was definitely for the better. And Bezel just hadn't found a way to conveniently mention it yet. So he sighed--and then he twitched up his face into a frown--but it still wasn't enough to mime away how incredibly displeasing the answer would be. 

"Most likely? My brother, Mammon. He'd be the only one with enough power. Since, as you know, our eldest brother disappeared many years ago." It was easy to say that his brother was missing, for more than just a lack of care. His Trammels still held, holding the Beasts in the fires of the Deireadh, so Bezel knew he was not dead. He was merely missing. 

Well, he assumed so anyway. He'd had Faun carrying active reports on the Deireadh until very recently. But considering the gap of time between the worlds--the entirety of Avernus could have been beneath hoof by now. He had no way of knowing anymore, not with the Faun refusing to speak to him. 

Then, the second domino. The whisperings at the low-streets, which led his Faun to abandon him in mass. Not that he particularly blamed them. Not that he particularly cared. Their contracts were cheap, so as long as he retained enough staff to operate Eden--well, the rest could flee. 

He didn't say this outloud. Not to Mayvalt. He knew better. But that must have been Mammon, too. Luring Faun in an attempt to arrange a rendezvous with Bezel. And he'd finally caught one. Her departed lover, Savalt. 

Mayvalt pulled her leather jacket tighter around her shoulders and shivered in the cool summer evening breeze. Bezel might have easily dismissed her chills if her face had not taken on a pale sheen. Over her false-foot filled leather boots, her legs trembled.

"Why'd you do it, boss?" Mayvalt asked. "I asked you--I begged you not to. I told you that you weren't strong enough to maintain another portal. Your eyes already came back. That night cost you your Heimrian teeth, too. If you keep acting so recklessly--soon you'll have your wings back, too." 

"I know." He said. That wasn't all, either. It was more than physical consequence he faced after the gate. It had been that attempt that had thrown his character into question with his Faun. Well, further question. 

Bezel's fingers twitched at his sides. He shut his eyes, and inhaled the cooling breeze. He didn't need to breathe anymore, but somehow he couldn't knock the hollow action. "If you want an answer from me, Mayvalt, you'll have to wait until I have one to give. I don't know. I should have listened. I myself can feel how weak I've become. It was. . . illogical."

Mayvalt glanced down at her leather boots and frowned. "Was it you, Ba'al? Can you tell me that, despite any reason, it was your choice?"

Bezel had the sense that nothing he had ever done was by his own volition. He was a timeless husk, floating insignificantly between places that he neither picked nor longed for. In between, he chauffeured Faun through the Heimrian world, masking their demonic tells, providing them with housing and employment.

Had he ever picked any of those things for himself? No, of course not. It had only been easier than resisting. Nothing much mattered to him, so why not? Did it bother him that despite years of protection--they still looked at him like that? Eyes lowered, bodies trembling, heavy scent of fear hovering between them. No, of course not.

But it might have--if he could care.

Because this gate was simply another of these things that he could not quite explain. Why had he attempted to open it? Why did his brother aid him? When he thought back to that late night last spring, it felt an entirely different being crashing through the cerulean pine with shoes ill-suited for the elements. 

"Let's go find what we came for." He said instead. The guests that his brother had promised him would be arriving soon. 

Mayvalt sighed, and surrendered to the immovable indifference of her immortal employer. "Your brother?"

He had to tell her. She had to know that they'd spoken, and that Bezel had agreed the world she loved was an easy price to pay for finding his missing soul. He simply shrugged his shoulders, "of sorts,"

"Well, my vote would be to follow the smell of blood and battle." Mayvalt quipped casually. Her fingers strayed to her hair, stroking the glimmering gold hidden there. 

"The what?" Bezel blinked. 

She sighed and pointed down the beach before tapping her nose with her index finger. "It's been heavy on the breeze since we came this way." 

"Ah, of course," he muttered blankly, "then show me the way." 

Mayvalt nodded and picked up her boots to avoid sinking into the sand. Bezel paused. He glanced over his shoulder, looking across the surface of the bubbling lake. 

"Such an odd place to leave a gate." He murmured to himself.

"What, boss?" Mayvalt called.

"Nothing," he sighed, "let's go." 

• • •

Mayvalt, as she usually was, had been correct. There had been a battle on that small patch of beach, that much was clear. A war had been fought between the ocean-wide lake and the edge of the crisp pine. Muddy-thick sand had been painted red, except where it ran pink from the gently rising tide. 

All that--and the corpse. 

Which might have been the biggest clue--but Bezel was getting rather bored of this game of cat and mouse. Mayvalt's breath froze in the pitch of her throat. She shuddered and gagged, turning a shade of green not totally dissimilar to the pine needle canopy over their heads. She pressed shaking palms to her lips and spun away so that she would not have to face the hide.

Bezel strolled forward. If he could feel interest, he might have wished he could now. He'd never seen something like this--not in a single second out of any of his endless years. Because the Progeny had never left the bodies before. 

Bezel imagined the size of this creature had once been massive. Taller than skies, bigger than mountains. It was hard now to say, considering that all that remained was the shell. Gelatinous mounds of loose gray flesh, roughly scalped from the skeleton that had been inside. 

Picked clean and left to rot. 

"It's a Behemoth, Mayvalt." He called loosely. 

"T-that's nice, boss!" She replied shakily. 

Her fear was a scent nearly as heavy as the decay. At least two weeks' worth of summer suns had rested on the skin, withering it into a dehydrated lump of sour-smelling meat. The battle was long lost for the creature. 

But what were the odds of the victors still remaining? Bezel's glimmering golden eyes darted between the trees before resting on Mayvalt's doubled-over form. She shouldn't be here--why did he bring her? Because he always had? He needed her to tell him when he was wrong. He needed her to guide him past the obstacles he couldn't see. But he didn't need her now. He already had his course charted. He knew that what he had to do, she would never find peace with. 

"Mayvalt, go back to the car." 

The golden cuff in her hair glittered as she turned beneath the soft moonlight. "I'm good, boss! I'm good." 

"Mayvalt," he sighed, "please just go back." 

She scrunched up her strawberry pink eyebrows and tilted her head in a doggish mock-up of confusion. A move Bezel had pulled countless times. "Why? Do you think they're still around?" 

"Probably," he shrugged. He didn't. He didn't think so anyway--but this was a brand new level of unpredictable. He didn't know what else they could be playing at. First, leaving behind evidence of demonic creatures on a public beach--no matter how abandoned it currently was--was atypical of the goody-two-shoes Bezel knew. 

He heard it before he sensed it; the sudden spike of Mayvalt's pulse. She stood, eyes wide at something just beyond Bezel's back. Her green face was quickly draining to a moonlight pale. Her fear became perfume on which someone more attuned than Bezel could get drunk on. She lifted her finger and, with an outstretched and trembling finger, pointed towards the lake. 

"Ba'al," 

He turned. At first, he didn't see it. There was the corpse of the rotting Behemoth. Beyond that, the shores and depths of Lake Seneca. The water had an illusion of nearly glass, disturbed only by the gently rocking waves. Which found themselves pressed across the surface of the lake by the midnight breeze.

But there it was--rising slowly from those softly churning tides.

"Mayvalt, go back to the car." 

"What is that?" Mayvalt stepped forward. Her leather boots departed the edge of the forest and sunk into the ruined sand. 

"Mayvalt, the car." 

"Is that. . .  a man?" 

There was not a man rising from the depths of Lake Seneca. Men did not come from the gate torn into the silt-heavy earth at the bottom. Because men did not lurk on the other side, in the scorched lands of the Deireadh. Bezel moved forward, pulled by invisible strings of non-existent curiosity. 

"Boss?" Mayvalt chirped.

The water engulfed his leather dress shoe and then the mud as he sunk himself into Lake Seneca. He walked forward, placing a distance more than just physical space between himself and the girl on the shore.

"Boss!" She called. 

But he had more pressing issues. Bezel took another plunge. He felt neither cold nor wet. He felt nothing at all. Not even fear. Hardly even recognition. But soon he would. If he only helped Mammon--he could have it all back. So, he walked until the water began to lap at the tip of his tie. Until the man walking up the bank stood only an arm's stretch from him. 

His midnight black hair hadn't been trimmed in centuries. It hung in water-curled ringlets down his back, disappearing back beneath the lip of the lake where it rested against his lower back. His armor was perfectly polished, so that it seemed liquid silver adorned across his broad chest. When he gazed at Bezel, it was with eyes the color of crushed dandelions, slit in the middle by inky black pools. Cat eyes, set in a sloping almond shape. In Heimr, they'd taught Bezel words to describe those eyes--many more words than he could care to recount and not all of them kind. But there was one that he had found he preferred; fox-eyed. 

He stared into a man made of himself. A mirror in which his pearl-white fangs and glistening golden cat eyes seemed even brighter. It wasn't real. The boy dripped with the pear-sweet scent of magic. Bezel wondered what his face might look like beneath the twisted version of himself, and why his brother had bothered to take the time to change it. 

"Which one are you?" Bezel asked cooly, because there was no denying who this must have been.

"The first," the boy answered. His voice hissed between his sharpened fangs, filling Bezel with the sense that he was gazing down at a viper. 

The first of his brother's children.

"Belial." He recounted.

He grinned and bowed his head. "Uncle." 

"Come on, we have much to discuss." Bezel prompted. "I'd rather not do it as minnows chew on my shoes." 

Belial nodded and breezed past Bezel, embarking for his first dry steps in New York. Bezel followed disconcertedly behind, watching with detached neutrality as his nephew climbed ashore. The water rolled down the glistening silver hide of his Avernian metal to tangle in the pink sands. 

If he found it at all strange, stepping into a new world, he did not show it. He kept his olive-toned features set carefully blank. Unlike Bezel, it was polished. Earned. Created. A soldier who was trained to hide himself beneath armor. One who'd taken care even to hide their true appearance beneath some laughable game of magic-genetics. 

She was the first to extend a harsh blow of reality into the cool night.

"Who are you?" 

She stood, trembling like a leaf in the thrashing winds of a hurricane, but with her arms crossed defiantly over her chest. 

"Mammon?"

Belial tilted his head, grinning with sharpened fangs. The silver mask placed over his true self slipped. And beneath was contempt raw enough to scorch. "You should mind your manners, little lamb."

She turned pale--for only a moment. And then her fists were curling at her sides, a snarl slipping past her blunt teeth. "Why, you little-"

"That's enough." Bezel groaned dully. "Mayvalt, this is my nephew. Of sorts." 

"Nephew? Who's son?" Mayvalt echoed. "Sap. I know you can't help it, boss, but you're acting way too calm about all this." 

"Mammon." He said, and nothing else, because he had no response to what he could not understand. To him, everything moved down a flat and steady road. Belial was not even a bug against the pavement. He was nothing. If his presence here was truly alarming, that was something Bezel would never know. 

"Mammon's son?" She squeaked, her wide eyes finding Bezel in the dark.

"It's alright," he said, shrugging off his dampened suit jacket. "I made a deal. I assume his father sent him to see I hold to it."

Belial flinched, only in the corners of his mouth where they pressed down into a sneer, but Bezel had been training himself in the skill of dissecting expressions for a millennia and it did not escape his attention. He reasoned that he knew the cause. It was as if he hadn't expected his ploy to be discovered so quickly.   

"Uncle," the boy, who looked like Bezel, purred. "I'm merely here to-" 

"Be careful." Bezel warned dully. "You have not yet lied to me and once you do, it will be too late."

He froze. He turned his yellow eyes to the sand and steered his stolen face into neutrality. Mayvalt scoffed, shaking her peach-toned head. 

"You made a deal? With Mammon? When?" She barked.

"When-" when he spoke to the rotten corpse of Savalt, when he promised to burn this world to ash. When he betrayed her. Again. "we split apart in the search for Savalt. We spoke then." 

"You heard his voice?" She asked. "Like in the low-streets? All those whispers?"

"I heard his voice." He confirmed. 

"And you made a deal? With Mammon?" She said slowly. 

"I did." 

"For what?" She hissed. 

"He knows where my soul is." Bezel said. 

Mayvalt's eyebrows furrowed. "Your soul? Boss, only you know where your soul is! They haven't even come back yet, or you'd know that, too. You're letting him mix you all up!" 

Belial snarled, "watch your mouth, She-Goat." 

"Make me, soggy-socks!" She snapped back. 

Belial glanced down at the wet surface of his iron boots and snarled again before Bezel raised his hands in a silencing gesture. "That's enough, kids. Mayvalt, I know what I'm saying sounds illogical but Mammon says that there was interference in the soul's natural path." 

"Interference? From who?" She quirked her head. "No, nevermind. It's just not possible. Everyone knows that! Heimrian souls can't be meddled with! It goes against every law, every war, every choice the three worlds have ever made!" 

"Tell that to the All King." Belial said and then spat on the blood-stained sand to wash the name from his mouth. 

Mayvalt eyed him anxiously before sighing heavily. She lifted her hands to her pink hair and sunk her fingers down to the crest of her antlers. "Boss, your older brother has a reputation. The Mongrel of War, the King of Avarice, the Lord of Greed--okay, those are not cute little nicknames! Why are you taking his word so seriously? What are you going to do when you find out he was lying?" 

"It's not impossible that the key was taken, Mayvalt." 

She laughed and shook her head. "Sap, boss. Whatever it is he asked for--I just hope it'll be something you can take back." 

"It's all just insignificant." He said. "Everything that is not my key. It's all just. . . nothing." 

"The price might not be something you can pay, boss." Mayvalt said. "It'll fall on us. Your Faun." 

Bezel blinked his lazy yellow cat eyes. That was their fault then. They should have known better than to assume he would keep his word, protecting them from harm until the end of time. He was incapable. He'd always return to a point, the same mistake, he'd always get the ones he loved killed. 

Just as he'd gotten them killed. 

"Mayvalt, go mind the car." 

Then perhaps there was hope for them yet--because love was no longer something Bezel had to give.

"Don't push me away!" She snapped. "I'm the only one who can help you!" 

She was his lighthouse, a strong guiding light to pierce the bleak when the storms got too all-consuming. He knew that his night skies were oil-thick and that she was the only star pointing the way north. He knew that she could pull him away from the cliff. That maybe she should. 

But if she succeeded, then he failed. Mammon was playing more games than Bezel could trace. He would be naive to blindly trust his brother--but the bait was far too tempting. So, he had to try. 

"Go to the car." Bezel said. "I will not warn you again." 

"I don't know what you're planning, Ba'al, but don't expect to find me when it's all over." She whimpered. She glanced at Belial and shook her head. And then she was simply gone. Vanishing between the pine as gracefully as a Faun could. 

"Better to not linger around those kinds, Uncle." Belial muttered darkly. 

"Those kinds?" 

"Demons." He spat. 

He glanced over, staring into an identical set of glowing eyes. "Are we any different?" 

"We are not of their world." Belial said. "You've just forgotten." 

"Yes," Bezel agreed. "There's a lot that I've forgotten." 

"You'll get it back, Uncle." Belial said. "Soon." 

"I've heard that sentiment before." He agreed. Bezel coaxed his lifeless lungs to inhale. He'd forced himself to blow out an exasperated breath before realizing that without her, there was no point in playing pretend. He fell still, and silent, and gazed across the water. 

"What do I have to do now?" 

"My father is sending his army soon. When the Trammel is weakest." Belial said. 

"At the full moon," Bezel surmised.  

"All you need to do is command them." He said.

"To do what?" Bezel asked blankly.

"To raze this world." 

Bezel gazed upon the center of the lake, at the slowly breathing waves that softly swayed the reflection of the glistening silver moon. It was waxing to a near crescendo. 

"In three days." Bezel said. "The full moon is in three days." 

"Not much longer, Uncle." Belial nodded. "And then this pathetic place will no longer exist." 

Bezel had nothing much to say. He nodded in return and turned to head back for his car, hoping with only slight sincerity that Mayvalt hadn't left him behind to hike back to club Eden. He paused, turning to face the near carbon copy of him on the beach. "What will you do with your final nights in this world?" 

"Looking for suggestions?" Belial asked. 

"Merely making conversation." Bezel deflected. 

He blew a breath from his nose and turned to face the lake. "This is not my first time in this place. I came here once, twenty years ago. So, perhaps I should like to visit some old friends." 

Bezel paused. His eternally disinterested mind hovered over each word, mulling them slowly under his burning yellow gaze. He didn't know which chord had struck him. It only seemed a familiar melody. His brother had said something so similar not too long ago. 

It was me who tried to stop this whole fiasco twenty years ago.

"Friends?" Bezel repeated slowly. "I know a great many demon, perhaps I know them, too." 

Belial spat, "demons? I'd never dirty myself." 

"Heimrians hardly make for better company." Bezel shrugged. 

"These ones do, Uncle." Belial chuckled. "They were quite entertaining." 

"Ah," Bezel clicked his tongue softly, "then you must mean the Progeny." 

Belial's eyes flickered towards him before darting even quicker back towards the sand under his wet boots. And then it made sudden and complete sense. Why hadn't he seen it before? The angels loved nothing more than themselves. There was no chance they'd leave anything to chance. There was nowhere else they'd leave something of great import. 

Then the soul had to be among them. A faceless figured, mixing into the people who hated him most. Bezel knew that he would laugh about this soon. But until then, he turned and walked into the gloomy blue pine with a mask of apathy painted across his sharp face.

History, he thought dully, sure has a funny way of repeating.