The wind curled along the smoking grounds, blowing up rust-red dust that blocked Bezel's keen yellow eyes--not that there was anything to see beyond the haze. He had wandered endlessly for what seemed like days to him--but could have only been hours--and hadn't managed a glimpse of anything that was not a jagged rock or steam-spitting geyser.

The only indication that he still traveled in some sort of direction was the faint whispering trail of ice-cold Fetor. In the pit of the furnace, his melted shoes dragging along the cracked and split ground, the Fetor was an easy thing to find. If Bezel had been asked to explain how he thought the feeling might be to someone who could trace those sorts of things, he would have compared the stream of magic to a stray breeze on a crowded train in the middle of July.

Bezel's sword dragged along the orange sands, carving a line into the ground that he faintly hoped would lead him back the way he had come. A sort of useless reminder--considering there would be no retreating into Heimr. He had hardly survived the trip down, he certainly couldn't make one back up. Besides, he had left Mayvalt somewhere with a bloodthirsty Bishop who had lips that might have

If something--anything--was going to plan, he hoped it was her half. She should have arrived in Heneth. She would have found Bezel's sister. If she was in one of her moods--maybe she would offer them the help they needed. Information on Mammon, or Avernus in general. A map to his other siblings, perhaps. Siblings who would rise to the occasion of war--because, Bezel very well knew, that Astarte would not. She had been against the First Demon-Born war. She certainly wouldn't be signing up for a second.

Or, if they were unlucky, then she was in her other mood. The one Bezel had been all too aware of when volunteering a Faun and a Heimrian disguised as a Faun to find her. His sister had a type, If Bezel had to put it into modern explanation. And a need. Or, an obsession--that was a more accurate description of it. One that came from thousands and thousands of years of being hailed as a god--or a monster. It was a hobby of acquiring worshippers. Wives, husbands, pets. Bezel didn't know what to call them anymore--it didn't really matter. Their lovesick devotion was the core of their purpose. And Mayvalt, he very well knew, would have kicked skulls before falling for it but it didn't stop his mind from whirling over all the possible mistakes that had happened in his absence. The uncountable ways in which everything could have crashed down into disaster as he wandered aimlessly in the pits of Avernus.

What if they had never made it at all? What if his weak portal had zapped them clear out of existence? Mayvalt, gone forever, and the Bishop already halfway to becoming a dandelion next spring. Or they had made it and it hadn't mattered. They'd been met with something worse. Well, worse than the Prince he had sent them towards.

His mind, once he allowed it down the path, began to rapidly spiral into more elaborate and more creative ways in which Mayvalt and the Bishop could have been harmed. By the time the Fetor trail began to swell in the air, drowning the inside of Bezel's throat and nose with a bitter and frosty sting, he was fervently denying the possibility that the two had been eaten alive by worms or kidnapped by a traveling circus. But a circus, if he had to lose them, was a good place for those two to end up. He could imagine the clown-show they had surely been performing already. Suddenly, he was plenty grateful to be on his own in the haze. But just how alone he really was would only become clear as Bezel's eyes detected the darker blotch ahead.

Stamped into what was otherwise orange and foggy, was a crack of dark gray. It was the shape of a cartoonishly drawn lightning bolt on its head. It was wider at the bottom, running up into a thinning and jagged point. A cave, he realized slowly. One formed in a fission between two plates making up the walls of the basin. If there was any where wolves were going to be, Bezel would have placed his money on a damp, dark, rather unpleasant seeming cavern.

He squared his shoulders beneath his dirt-covered dress shirt, lofted his kris up against his chest, and marched forward towards the thickening wards. Fetor didn't go entirely unnoticed to Bezel. He might not have felt the true weight of it, the fear he was meant to cower beneath or the anger he was meant to rise to, but he could feel the nettle-like sting of it against his intrusion. The magic curled at his presence, lazily flashing its bone-white fangs in humble warning. The barrier, however, was leagues less difficult to penetrate than the Trammel had been--and Bezel had somehow managed that much.

He strolled forward with a carefully placed expression across his dark brows and sharp features. One he hoped said, 'don't bite--down, good dog.'

The last few steps across the barren desert made all that came before seem a jog through Central Park. It was almost as if the ground had teeth. Small and needle sharp that reached up into the soles of his feet to steal the last few droplets of energy he had been clinging desperately onto. By the time Bezel had finally stumbled into the mouth of the cave, it was with ragged breaths he didn't quite need. He pitched forward, his palm just barely catching on the rocky wall making up the lips of the cavern. Maybe because of the shadows beyond, maybe because of the ice-cool Fetor soaking the very fabric of the air around--but Bezel's skin did not steam and sizzle on the inside wall of the cave. Not that his skin so easily baked--but as he slipped forward, tossing his shoulders into the rock to catch his trembling legs, his clothes did not catch on fire and that seemed a good sign.

His shoes, more liquid now than string or italian leather, slipped on the glassy stone constructing the cave floor. Bezel went down onto his legs, landing with a thud that echoed back to his ears in warbled mockery. His sword clanged beside him, sending out a reverberating metallic scream that must have descended for miles and miles into the tunnel ahead.

As terrible and splitting as the noise had been, it ended. Sheltered from the wind and spitting geysers, no sound rose up to replace it. Bezel stayed still and silent in the soft dim, his keen yellow eyes glimpsing as far as they could into the cavern. It seemed to go on, sloping down, down, down, and down, until its twisting shape stopped Bezel from seeing any further. The pathway must have expanded from there. Brothers, for all Bezel knew it could have opened into another section of the pit. One more hazardous than the half he had survived.

Well, he thought bitterly, there was really only one way to tell.

He collected his shaking legs beneath himself and shoved upwards, his back sliding along the rock to help maintain his chances of reaching his full height. His body dipped as unsteadily as the rolling seas, but he managed to control his awkward steps forward into the tunnels.

Bezel sunk into the tides of Fetor, dark, damp, and quiet. His sword trembled in his weak grasp, reflecting off the occasional orange bursts to his back until not even the scorch could reach him in the throat of the shaft. The slick slope downwards was manageable for nearly twenty lurching steps. Until Bezel's heel came out from under him. His spine made forceful impact with the rock. If his bones had been human, they might have snapped.

His yellow eyes fluttered to the jagged roof of the tunnel, staring up at sharp tips of onyx black stalactites--or stalagmites or whichever word conveyed his meaning best. Maybe neither, though, since the pike wasn't dripping and that seemed a key ingredient in the formation.

Bezel groaned in dizzying frustration and curled onto his side, rubbing the back of his head where it distantly ached and throbbed. He was more than giddy that no one had witnessed his complete and utter failure so far. A joy that was quickly robbed from him by the intruding force on his ringing ears.

"Do you never grow tired of doing it all wrong, Beelzebub?"

His cat eyes fluttered across the pitch black tunnel as quickly as he could snap his neck to make it happen. To both sides of him, there was the curling closeness of the walls. To his flattened back, there was only the ground he had already covered. Beyond his boiled shoes, there was the depths. Bezel squinted into it, tipping his fuzzy head to endure the confusion that begged to break past the barrier of his curse.

"Do I know you?" He asked the echo. It didn't reply to his whisper.

"You are going the wrong way." She said with a voice as smooth as the stone beneath his ruined shoes.

Bezel didn't know who, where, or what she was--but it did nothing to stop the dry sarcasm he often reserved for Mayvalt from springing up past his cracked lips. "And how do you know which way I'm meant to be going?"

And then he saw her. Or, her eyes in the pitch black tunnel. Glowing pools of emerald green that became the only light in the darkness. She stalked forward, stopping at the cusp of curling orange light so that all that could be seen of her were those glimmering eyes in predatory slant. "Because there is nothing here. Nothing to seek."

"You're here." He rasped, unsure of who you entailed.

"As I said," she chuckled, "nothing to seek."

Bezel pulled his legs to his body, slowly rising with his sword held aloft. The movement seemed to only pull a laugh from her. One so wide, he caught a momentary glimpse of her fangs in the dark.

"You know who I am?" Bezel asked.

"I can smell it in your blood, Prince." She snarled. Her claws curled along the stone beneath them, making a horrible scraping that rivaled the wailing his sword had made against that same stone earlier. "I felt the moment that gate spat you out. And," she rumbled with humor, "I would be a fool to not know my own kin."

Bezel's fingers tightened on the curled handle of his sword, his limbs tensing in preparation of swinging it. Family matters were often tricky for Bezel--mostly, that meant any he met wanted to kill him. Especially here, in this den of dogs. Bezel knew the stories--he had lived them. Wolves came from one place. They were the teeth of greed, plucked from the very mouth Bezel wanted to shove a sword into himself. His agreement to find the one wolf they needed hadn't come as easily as he had played it. Wolves were wolves, even among Avernians they were seen as something twisted and wrong. There were, well,

"Blood of Mammon."

The wolf in the dark answered with a rumble deep from her throat. "My blood of course has an origin, but that is not my name."

"Of course," Bezel said stiffly. "And your name would be?"

She did not answer. She did not have to. Maybe he remembered the stories better than he gave himself credit for--maybe it was the music of her bones cracking and rearranging beneath the surface of her skin. Her fangs clattered along the stones as they fell from her mouth, broken off at her bleeding gums. Her bare foot slipped forward into the orange light--her human foot. Her skin was milk white, creased with age that not even she could recount anymore. Her eyes, which still shone, hung much higher in the dark then until they followed the rest of her pinched face into the murky light. Her rust red hair hung in tangles down to her thighs. The shadows, her unruly curls, and Bezel's quickly averted gaze was all that dressed her.

"Alukah," The Third Prince greeted in overly cheery fashion, "pardon, I thought you'd died."

She twisted her thin lips into an eerie grin over her sharp human teeth. "Do you no longer?"

"Well," Bezel coughed awkwardly. "The conversation we're having right now might have convinced me otherwise."

Alukah grumbled something unintelligible and shook the head perched atop her thin throat. The movement seemed forced, as if she had been attached to hooks and wires. Or, that might have just been the condition of her body. Her paper skin was stretched thin over each of her knobby bones. Her ribs protruded through the tangled ropes of her hair, her kneecaps were thicker than her thighs. She was a corpse--if not in actuality, than in every other way that counted.

"Do not be so easily swayed by what your eyes tell you. Not when your enemy is so near."

Her words came as arrow tips, plunging into Bezel's impenetrable flesh. They burrowed down into bone, infecting his mind with memories he had long given up on cherishing. He could still smell the smoke curling through the pine trees, hear the hunting dogs barking on his heels. The horse beneath him screamed in fear, stomping her hooves. If she had a name--it had never been told to Bezel. He had leaned forward, whispering into her flickering ears. When she quieted it hadn't been because of those silly comforting words, it had been from the magic he used to show her the real path before them--free of fires and hounds. And still, his brother had laughed. Atop his own stallion, a giant beast the color of bronze who had not even whinnied once since the Ely had set their illusionary tricks upon the battlefield.

"What a way you have with Heimrians, little brother," he had called, a grin splitting all of the face Bezel could see beneath his White-Iron helmet.

"This is a horse." Bezel had muttered--earning only more earth shaking laughter in return.

Bezel's skull tightened with near-painful familiarity--which he shoved quickly and dismissively away. Those words, echoing in his mind, were meaningless. Some poetic whimpering whispers the night before battle--but not words he had invented. They only invoked his image because he had thought of him earlier as he watched the Trammel flicker. Or so Bezel was quick to assume--until he saw the smirk carved into Alukah's hollow cheeks. Her grin vanished the second Bezel's eyes were on it. Her face fell and did not twist again.

"You knew I was coming." Bezel whispered. "No--no, you were told. When? For how long has this been playing out exactly as it was meant to? For how much longer will it? Has he already written it--the ending he desires?"

"When he told me the ending he seeks, I wept." Alukah whispered fervently. "It will be a finale more beautiful than the death of a thousand stars. I know that you can feel it, too."

Bezel's teeth clenched. "I can't feel-"

"Shh!" Alukah snapped, surging forward out of the black. Her hands clasped Bezel's arms, squeezing until his bones creaked. "Shh, do you hear that?" Her glowing eyes rolled feverishly across the inky tunnels.

Bezel held his invisible breath and counted the seconds in his mind. There was the ragged rattle of Alukah's lungs, the whistling whisper of wind at the mouth of the cave--and nothing else.

Her wide eyes found him, pining to his face. "He is. . . he is talking to me again."

Bezel forced his throat to swallow, to push up the words he would have rather choked on. It wasn't him. It couldn't be. No one had heard from him in centuries--and yet, Bezel asked, "What is he saying, Alukah?"

"He says," she giggling childishly, releasing Bezel's arms to cover her curling lips, "you are going the wrong way."

"I can't be," Bezel said in a tone too uncomfortably close to whining. "I'm looking for a wolf-"

Alukah drew her eyebrows down into a sharp snap and shook her head, whimpering. "No!"

Bezel froze, chilled into stone where he stood. "Alukah-"

"No!" She screamed. Her voice echoed down the tunnels, deep into the dark from which she came. "There are no wolves here! There are no wolves in the dark! In the smoke! He stole them away! He took them from us!" Her body turned stiff and she whimpered again. "No, no, no, he takes them up--it is good. It is good--no! No, oh, no. They can not go up! They can not go up! Keep them down!"

Bezel's shoes squeaked along the stone as he slowly backed up, his sword held over his chest to keep the screaming snarling girl from advancing. "Who?" He asked softly. "Who took them away?"

"They do not deserve it." She whimpered, her hands pressed into her messy hair. "The darkness. I tried. . . I tried--but he said he was the king. He killed for it. Spilled the blood of my son. Kept me in chains. What choice did I have, please forgive me."

"Alright," Bezel said, "I forgive you."

Her glowing eyes snapped to him, widening in surprise as if she had never expected such words--or maybe she had forgotten Bezel was still in the cave with her at all. "Wait!"

Bezel didn't want to listen to her barking commands but he froze before his mind could catch up with the rest of him. He rolled his wrist, testing the reach of his curved sword.

"He told me something else," she said.

Bezel nodded his head, "alright."

"He said you had better hurry." Alukah whispered. "There is not much time left."

"Time?" Bezel squinted. "Time for what?"

"Before the death, of course." She giggled. Her ear twitched, her neck snapping around to face the dark tunnels behind her. "Oh, oh, okay, I will tell him--I will tell him."

"Alukah," Bezel prodded as sweetly as he could muster.

"He says you can no longer hide it." She answered. "Not if you want to reach them in time."

"Them--it?" The answer became clear before the question could pass his tongue. Mayvalt and Ira. They were in danger, of course they were--they were in Hell. Danger, Bezel knew and hoped, they could handle.

His eyes darted past her shoulder, down into the winding tunnels. Were there no wolves? Or was he being tricked? Pushed further down a winding plot he had yet to untangle. "I can't trust my eyes any more than you can trust your ears, Alukah. What if he isn't who he claims to be? The First Prince who heard those words with me all those centuries ago is dead--or dying. I saw the Trammel he placed over the pit, it's failing. If he's alive--he's not sending me coded messages through, no offense, an unreliable narrator. A daughter of Mammon, in fact."

Alukah smirked playfully, "You suspect me of working with my father?" Her words were clear again. Unsettlingly so, as if her fits before had been performed by an actress miles away.

"Willingly or unwillingly." Bezel agreed. "Ely are tricksters. They fold and bend the fabric of reality--the things you see, smell, hear, believe."

"Then, do not trust me, Prince." She smiled softly, spreading out her open palms in humble surrender before gesturing down into the tunnels towards her gnarled spine. "I invite you to find your wolf. They lived down there once upon a time. In some dark corner of the labyrinth that I can no longer recall. I have tried for centuries to find my way back to the expired hearth and have not yet succeeded. Who knows, perhaps you will have greater luck. Maybe your Soul will still be there when you emerge in a few thousand years."

Bezel's shoulders flinched over that one little word. "My Soul is something I've given up on by taking on this quest."

"How can you be so sure?" She asked.

"I would know if I could feel." He hissed. "I don't! I don't feel anything but-"

"Then, seek." She interrupted, holding her needle thin fingers aloft, pointing into the dark. "If you feel no fear that your companions will die in your absence, then seek down into the depths. If you feel no shame, reveal what you have hidden and go to them before it is too late. Fly on those broken wings, Fly-Lord, you will have to if you hold any hope of finding anyone in time."

He says you can no longer hide it.

The narrow path of flesh and clenched muscles between the plates of his shoulder blades almost burned at her words, at the knife-like shape they took in the air. He took a small skittering step backwards, his lungs inhaling smoke, dust, and Fetor.

Fetor--the Fetor, how stupid could he be. Bezel bowed his head, letting his yellow cat eyes drift slowly shut. The ice-cold feeling found him, curling across his exposed flesh and prickling at his lungs. His heart might have fallen in disappointment at the realization piecing together in the back of his mind.

"This Fetor," Bezel admittedly in a voice hardly even a whisper, "it must be a decade old by now."

The magic was paper thin--enough Bezel thought he might be able to shred it with a simple tap from his sword. It held in the air, only collecting dust. Nothing more than emptied picture frames in a rummage sale, hollowed of the faces that used to rest behind the protective glass.

"As I said," Alukah said gravelly, "there is nothing here to seek anymore, little Prince."

Bezel found her form in the dim, her trembling limbs and matted hair. "Where did they go?"

She laughed, throwing her head back as if praying to the moon. "How would I know? I have been left behind."

Bezel was familiar with being left behind. It had happened to him more times than he could reasonably be expected to count. So, maybe, that was why he surged towards her, the hand he did not hold his sword with extended towards her. "You can come with me. If all the other wolves have left their banishment, I see no reason why you should share in it alone. It must feel incredibly lonely down there."

Alukah startled, taking a hasty step backwards into the shadows. Her glowing eyes widened, her mouth pressed down into a frown. For many moments, she said nothing at all. Until finally, her frown shifted into a tired smile. Bezel thought for one second she would reach back and take his hand--but Bezel was not an ally most people chose willingly, and it was no different then. Not even between two lost and forgotten near-immortals. She shook her head, whispering sweetly, "We all have our parts to play, Prince. Mine is not yet complete and yours is only beginning. Now, run along but do not forget all his warnings."

Bezel nodded and turned on his heels, her words echoed in his ears, pointed and drilling as he trotted back out into the searing red desert. He wasn't scared--no, he really wasn't. But he was as exhausted as he could will himself to be of playing games. If the gamemaster wanted to speed up the ending, who was he to deny it? He would go willingly. As he had into the pit. As he had to the gate the night they had fought Legion. He would go willingly to his fate. And he ran, on broken shoes and shaking legs, because--well because there was too much smoke in the air to fly.