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Chapter 26
El Diablo
Lord of Hell. Not for awhile, I’m afraid.“Wait a minute. This is the Lucifer?” asked Buffy.
“Well, sort of,” said Lillith. “It’s also Astaroth, Agaliarept, Nebiros, about a dozen others. It’s an amalgamated manifestation. These guys aren’t exactly limited by conventional physicality. In fact, while in an amalgamated state they can’t even be considered separate entities. More like different aspects of the same entity, although Lucifer is definitely the dominant aspect.”
To quote a phrase, we are legion. So, is this THE Buffy Summers? The bitch I have to thank for bringing down my empire? asked the helix. It seemed to coil about itself in a strangely non-Euclidian way, crystalline lattices sliding over crystalline lattices.
“That would be me, yeah,” said Buffy.
Come to gloat, have you? Come to fiddle while the multiverse burns?
“Ignore it, Buffy,” said Lillith. “It’s a has-been. Washed up. A nobody.”
You would know all about has-beens, wouldn’t you, Lillith?
“Great. We don’t like each other. We both knew that a long, long time ago,” said Lillith. “But for my own part, I’d rather deal with the devils I know and hate than that thing outside. So are you going to be nice archdemons and talk civil, or do I just seal up the Sanctuary and let the Abstract slowly bleed you dry? Because to be honest, I would get a real kick out of that.”
There was a pause, then the echoing thought, Talk.
“How did the Abstract end up here? Even if the First Ones escaped their imprisonment, that wouldn’t have allowed the Abstract to leave its native plane.”
It happened during our war with the First Ones, the Dark Host. These were the primordial creatures of this place, creatures you call Joergenson’s entities, Ether Phages, Phase Parasites, the Von Houseman Dark Mind. The Joergenson’s entities sought to deconstruct Hell’s etheric matrix, to deprive us of the magic needed to fight them. They’d learned, you see. After tens of thousands of years of brooding and plotting, they’d learned.
“The matrix is intact. I can still use magic down here, which means you can, too. What happened?”
When their success appeared inevitable, we assented to the use of a Singularity.
Buffy heard Lillith’s sharp intake of breath.
“Idiot!”
Survivor.
“What’s a Singularity?” asked Buffy.
Lillith turned to her. “It’s the magical equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb scaled up by several orders of magnitude. You start with a contained field of magical energy — a lot of magical energy. Then you compress it nearly instantaneously with an array of precisely timed magical concussion wavefronts. The magical field is crushed into a singularity, a region of infinite magical density and energy residing within a single geometric point. At the instant of singularity, the field rebounds explosively, unleashing a vast explosion of magical energy in every parallel plane of existence. I don’t know of anything that can survive it, except maybe for the Abstract.”
She turned again to the amalgam. “The detonation of the Singularity ripped a hole in the continuum, didn’t it? Opened a breach in the spacetime manifold that allowed the Abstract access to Hell.”
Yes. A mistake.
“That’s an understatement,” said Lillith.
This is all pointless.
“Maybe not. From what I’ve seen, the Abstract is still consolidating its hold in this dimension. It may still be vulnerable. You might be able to tip the balance, force it to phase back until the breach can be repaired.”
It has been attempted. It failed.
“So that’s it, then? You’re just going to cower here in the Sanctuary until eventually the Covenant Seals corrode or are destroyed? Doesn’t sound like a great plan to me,” said Lillith.
A subsonic rumble seemed to emanate from the crystalline helix.
Go.
Lillith shrugged. “Fine. Think about it. In the meantime, I’m going to actually try and do something constructive to solve this fine mess you’ve created.”
The Elder Power turned to leave. Buffy studied the helix for a few seconds, and by the time she started toward the others, they were already several yards away.
But that couldn’t have been right. They’d been standing right next to her, and the door was right nearby …
She picked up her pace. Something was wrong. Ascending the spiraling walkway seemed to get her no closer to Lillith and the others. In fact, she was getting farther away, and for some reason no one seemed to even notice.
Optical illusion? Buffy wondered. She turned around and tried going the opposite direction. Maybe what looked like down was really up. But after just one circuit of the Sanctuary galleries, it became clear that somehow neither direction led up.
My world and welcome to it the amalgam said within her head.
And then she felt the Sanctuary recede into a distant vanishing point, as if the reality of her surroundings were nothing more than the photon-etched fantasies of a television screen gone bad. Suddenly she was standing somewhere or nowhere on a black marble floor that stretched infinitely in all directions, and five feet away from her stood Angel, but it wasn’t Angel.
“I wanted to thank you,” said Angel/Lucifer.
“Thank me. For what? For destroying Pandemonium? For kicking your servants’ asses since I was sixteen? I think your gratitude is misplaced.”
Somehow, Angel had turned into Jenny Calendar.
“I wanted to thank you for all your hard work on my behalf all these years. Until the unfortunate Pandemonium affair, you were a most remarkable ally.”
“Oh, okay. I get it. This is where the head-games part of it comes in. I’ve been on these loony mind trips before, and this one isn’t even remotely subtle, Lucifer.”
“The Truth needs no subtlety, no shading, no nuance,” said Jenny as she faded into Elisa Hunter. “They never told you, did they? No one ever told you.”
Buffy felt irritation rise inside her. “No, but I suspect you will. Just don’t expect me to believe it.”
Faith — it was Faith now — laughed. “You never believe in anything anymore. Nothing except your friends and loved ones. I wonder, though, if they would still have the same faith in you if they knew that for all these years you had duped them into helping you fight by my side. That’s why the Slayer was always supposed to fight alone, Buffy. That’s why Faith and Kendra fought alone. Because those are the rules laid down by the other side. Because although you are my servant, you’re not supposed to corrupt others by bringing them into our unholy war. A silly commandment, but most of them are.”
“I’m not sure you’re up on the latest news, Lucifer. I’ve been killing your kind all these years. With friends like me, you don’t need enemies,” said Buffy.
The demon became Willow and said, “Sending those demonic cretins back here was exactly what I wanted you to do. Do you honestly think I wanted those mental pygmies running around in your world where they could ruin my careful plans for your race? Where they could sow chaos and keep the forces of good vigilant and prepared? That’s the last thing I wanted. By sending them back, by keeping Mankind from ever learning the true extent of the threat they faced, of the magnitude of evil in the universe, you helped me immeasurably, and I thank you for it.”
Buffy scowled. “That line might have worked once, but you’re ninety years too late. I’ve gotten a lot more cynical since then. I don’t believe nearly as much anymore, least of all anything you have to say.”
“If you don’t believe me, believe Lillith. She’s a part of you. Look inside that part. Ask it. It can’t lie to you.”
“No.”
“You’re afraid.”
“Of course I am. You think I don’t know how easy it is for me to deceive myself? I can lead myself astray far easier than you can. I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.”
“You gave me my satisfaction a long time ago, dearest Slayer,” said Lucifer. For some reason, he was sticking with Willow now. “When you ceased being an innocent girl and became an instrument of beautiful death, that was my crowning glory with you.”
“I had no choice.”
“You’d like to think that.”
“What was I supposed to do? Let the vampires rule the world? Let the Judge or Acathla kill everything and everyone I cared about just to keep my hands clean?”
“It’s not the act, Buffy. It’s the sentiment. I’ve watched you kill my children. You liked killing them, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie to yourself, girl. You liked it. It made you feel powerful, alive. Godlike, even. The power of life and death with no consequences. Intoxicating, isn’t it?”
“I always knew where to draw the line,” said Buffy.
“Did you? And what line was that? The artificial one the Watchers drew for you, the one drawn by men too cowardly to hold humanity to account for its evils so long as there were convenient demons on hand to eviscerate in its stead? Or was it the line you kept redrawing year after year in your mind because you had to keep it one step ahead of the reality of your actions?”
“I never said I was proud of everything I did, Lucifer. I’ve made mistakes, been down some very dark corridors. I’m only human. Just because sometimes the dark angels of my nature get the better of my good intentions doesn’t mean I can’t find my way back.”
“Your good intentions? Good intentions and a subway token will bring you straight back to me when you die, Buffy. I don’t give a damn about your intentions. I care about the truth that lies beneath them. And by that measure you have proved yourself ever so worthy of me. Even I’ve lost count of the deaths, my dear child.”
Buffy felt her confidence slipping badly. Despite Lillith’s warnings and her own best efforts to keep her defenses up, he was getting to her. And she knew why. It was because underneath his attempts to deceive her were traces of truth. How many times in the last ninety years had she recognized the demon inside her and recoiled from it? How many times had she been horrified at the secret thrill that surged through her every time she killed a demon? And how many times since sharing the Dark Hunter’s white-hot thirst to destroy evil had she strayed past the Watchers’ point of no return and deliberately killed human beings? Too many. There were justifications for all of it, arguments on behalf of good against evil, extenuating circumstances and mitigating factors, rationales of self defense or of the greater good or the lesser of two evils. But were they really the truth, or just delusions she constructed to keep her from facing the truth of her own dark soul?
I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds … she thought
She shook herself from the destructive reverie and looked levelly at the image of Willow. “Oh, you’re good. Very good. And maybe if I’d lived an unexamined life, your version of the truth would have been enough to break me. But I’ve spent decades of sleepless nights examining my soul. A lot of the time, I don’t like what I find there, but at least I know what monsters hide within me and I’ve learned how to deal with them. And I know that there’s light to balance the dark, too. You can’t take that away from me. You can never take that from me. I won’t let you. You don’t have that power over me.”
Willow’s eyes flashed fire and she disappeared into darkness, and the environs of the Sanctuary returned in a rush.
We shall see, Slayer.
Buffy turned to leave the Sanctuary and found herself behind the wheel of a 1967 Camaro doing ninety down a desolate desert highway, Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” blasting from the Bose sound system.