NON-CONTINGENT VIOLENCE

Link to article: NON-CONTINGENT VIOLENCE.

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text=Before her waited Mammon, dragon-lord of avarice.]]

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**Author:** [[*user whenwerewe]]
[*https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/whenwerewe Here's my page!]
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The valley was starkly beautiful. At its centre wound a river of mercury, framed by thickets of fractaline ceramic shrubbery, whose reflected flickerings made the ridges on either side shudder with seeming activity. Ahead the two walls met and the river issued forth from the immensity of Mammon’s gate.

It rose thrice as high as they did, trudging up the slope over snow-crunching glass, a colossus pitted with pockmarks where the death-rattle of Amaymon had made its mark. Tungsten-carbide bones heaved slabs of steel and titanium toward the bleak basalt of the threshold. Finally the two of them came in one great crafted body to rest against its bulk.

Lumi Laine, last and best hope of the Global Occult Coalition, stared blindly out of her amniotic sac. Around her //Good Intentions// hummed reassurance, but she could not dull the edge to her thoughts.

Before them the gate rose like an entreaty to their lost Heaven. The pride of the princes of Hell would not allow such a thing to be plainly fashioned, but neither could the lesser devils endure any beauty too long. The face was covered in thick accretions of ruined and painstakingly reconstructed etchings. A great congeries of limbs and faces, maimed, struck blind, defaced with loving dedication so that the whole cliff-door was rendered scarred and organic.

The alveolic stone writhed in the light.

Lumi hesitated one moment, resisting //Intentions//’ slowly building bloodlust, and glanced down the great valley. Past pointillistic waves of granite (like Matterhorns in miniature) lay the heaving plain of Tophet. Atop it frantic: the Coalition’s expeditionary force, their beachhead secure, beyond all dream of rescue.

The logic of command was as unimpeachable as it was merciless. To endure the rigours of Hell was almost tautologically impossible. So they would remain below, secure amid miles of open firing-line, while Lumi claimed the head of the first of the Six. With the commanding heights of Malebolge seized, the merely human army would have some breathing room.

Even as she worried at her lip one moment the sharp voice of //Intentions// hissed:

//Every second you let the archdemons gather their strength, they’re in greater danger,// she buzzed, //Forward!//

So Lumi turned back to the terrible door, which had no clapper, no sentries, which did not budge one cubit under their broad six-fingered hands. When she looked at it the surrounding scree suddenly seemed irreal, an apparition against its solidity.

She hefted her blood-dimmed sword and it tore an arc through the air and hewed the sable stone. Something screamed distantly. A great wave of listlessness bore her down into the earth. Her limbs were as immoveable as the gate itself.

//He is waiting for you, and laughing,// her sister cried in her marrow, and she //wrenched// the sword, the rift sprouting cracks as the structure gave. For one instant every vein pulsed with the struggle, and she felt far away a calm and hopeless eye upon her, and then it wavered, and the threshold was opened in a great igneous avalanche that spread far down the valley. Half-molten, the debris threw up a quicksilver spray. The lenticular droplets shone like a new-dawning sun.

Then the light was gone, and gloom waxed over the newborn entrance. //Intentions// chanted grim satisfaction, and blaring starless fluorescence lit the way forward.

-----

Hell was not other people, Hell was not the absence of God; Hell was an office.

The gothic towers and impossible belfries of outer Malebolge gave way to a stylishly bright lobby of Cyclopean scale. Mist-shrouded walls rose primary-coloured in the distance. Past a lushly stocked moon-pantry tectonic vines fell tangled from the ceiling. Around her sprouting mycelial were stacks of desks at which laboured tiny and shrunken wretches. The virtues of an open-plan layout were understood (better than anyone else) by its inventors.

As their feet dredged the linoleum floor and exposed fresh earth, she laughed at how they appeared to the poor souls below. A trunklike headless torso, gashed by a gaping sharkmouth, studded with lidless ruby eyes, dragging a hunk of metal fit to butcher a kaiju. An intrusion into this desiccated unholy order. She ached to free the prisoners below, so beyond hope they would not flee their places even at the sight of them, but her sister urged her on. //One cannot empty a lake with a bucket.//

One other thing broke the monotony of their route: every few miles, the matte flooring was uprooted by a striding statue of Mammon. His smile glittered under the awful starlight, and his eyes were receding pits. He was a mangy and sunken thing, limbs overlong, too little fat padding stringy muscle over his ribs. Every time they came across a new statue, it seemed a little more tired, somehow.

Eventually, they came to a tower that rose to perceptual infinity, geological chalcedonic steps climbing vividly into the shadows. She could not say what had drawn them to it through the nonsense space, or how she knew that at its top waited the prince of Greed. But she did.

------

After a scant few minutes, they emerged into a richly appointed suite. The southern wall was a plane of volcanic glass, honed atom-smooth, through which the teetering armies of mankind were quite visible. The floor was blanketed in plush velvet, deep enough for a girl to drown in, and whole forests of teak and mahogany had been stripped for the furniture.

By the boulder-sized embers of a dying fire lazed a squat and rangy figure. Its pupiless eyes, sagging and half-lidded, flicked lethargically to the two of them. It rose unsteadily onto four wickedly taloned feet, tensioned with potential energy. The room was easily five miles across, and it looked ready to leap the whole distance. Out fanned two raggedly membraned wings, mottled with old injury, splayed until they shrouded the distant firelight.

Before her waited Mammon, dragon-lord of avarice.

She spared no words and lunged, ramjets spewing dimensionally-shunted gouts of hypergolics, throwing them clear halfway across the room in an eyeblink. One hand swept the sword through where his head had been as he twisted aside and yowled abominably. The carpets and walls erupted with the motion of demonkind.

Her sister answered instantaneously, half a hundred hardpoints screaming 6.16 point-defence and arcane rocketry through the air. Lemures blasphemed as they were spattered. But still they came like the tide and she ignored them and set her mind on the dragon. She leapt like a glacier upflung and her sword split air as he snaked around her, one foot dancing forward, carving the actuators on the back of her knee.

It buckled and she swang blindly behind her with one clenched fist. His tail wrapped around the limb and dragged her sideways to the floor. The devils climbed Lilliputian over her, bursts of her sister’s holy fire insufficient to hold them off, tearing into her skin like mites, fire in her flesh, as he kept back.

“Do you remember being Dagon?”

What? The molten iron that burned Gog and Magog flared across her back, and the swarming devils crumbled like snow. She stumbled to her feet and lurched forward, only for him to leap overhead, mocking her artless swings, and land by the entrance. The more distant devils hurled hexes that corroded and numbed her armour. She could not feel her fingers.

“Does it amuse you, to play janitor for this thing’s failures?”

Lightning arced from the goetic engines on her feet, burning the slain devils to keep yet more at bay.

He threw back his head and snapped it forward, spitting a glob of anaemic fire which sputtered against an upraised hand. It groaned against the heat.

He crept catlike toward her, nipping at her flesh. Her sister deployed their droneswarm to harass distant artillerists. A team of enterprising devils threw ropes around her legs and brought her to her knees again.

“You could be so much more than a nursemaid for this slip of flesh.”

His darting claw gouged out an eye, and she hissed in pain, stomping on nothing, and he laughed openly.

“You ought to be //enthroned//.”

And she remembered the redacted segments of her sister’s specs, the laugh when she crushed her enemies, the urge to always seek more, and once just the two of them, exploring the dark inside her, seeing with hazed eyes a coral idol tinged mauve.

She limped to her feet, and --

Stilled. Threw up her arms. Ignored the demons that burned lines of fire into her skin, the agony she pulsed down the channel, returning nothing.

The cavernous jaws opened and from them emerged the sound of grinding gears:

“Let’s make a deal.”

She willed herself to move, to decapitate his horridly grinning face. Her body stepped forward. One. Two. Her sword furrowed the ground in her hands. Her limbs did not obey her, were moved by another will, by her sister --

Which was impossible, unthinkable, she screamed down the line, STOP, and nothing happened. Her flesh betrayed her, and knelt at the feet of the beast. The devils retreated. He bent his head beside her, and she felt his breath, rank like a slaughterhouse.

Outside, a vicious howling, and a false sunset scrawled across the sky. Devils like smoke crawling toward the Coalition’s army. The gloating voice of Mammon as he glanced out:

“Cowards. The five have come to count their coup, now that I have dealt with you. They despaired so easily.”

He turned to look her in one of her eyes.

“Do not foul the air with your fear. Your comrades shall join you in Our tender embrace, soon enough.”

Her heart felt about to burst in her chest. She struggled to breathe, suddenly aware of the constriction of her amniosis about her, of jacks clamped to her spine, the needles impaling her, saturating her with unspeakable synthetics. She couldn’t think. Why wouldn’t her body move? How could did her sister turn so easily? She was silent, silent for the first time in almost a decade, all devotion vaporised in a turning of the wheel. In that moment, despairing, bowing to her bitterest enemy, like a crack in the firmament:

//He needed to taste your terror to believe,// said the soothing tones of her sister, //Now do it.//

And in one smooth motion she and //Intentions// rose and drove the sword through the base of Mammon’s jaw.

He jerked, once, and fell limp.

And she laughed wildly, felt the motion of her limbs again, gloried in the sensation of freedom, and sang down to her sister the instinctual love she felt, beyond all deceit.

The pyrite scales of the malformed dragon burst in a blaze of aurelic plasma. The force scourged the room, baring sheer rock, molten with the heat. The devils fled in terror.

Her cape ignited. The prophecies of John of Patmos fell as snow about her.

> And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea.

From the fire emerged a limb rippling with muscle, skin burning gold and brass, eyes that were diamonds. A claw slammed into her shoulder, crushing steel like tin, sending her reeling. Her sister screamed an alarm. She gathered her footing, leapt forward, and her sword snicked into his half-emerged torso, embedded and jerked from her hand in a mist of platinum blood.

> The dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed.

He sprung out of the ruin of his old body, reborn resplendent, mouth a snarl, wings whole and bright, a dragon true at last, closer to god than animal. His teeth clamped onto her knuckles and wrenched a cry of pain from her lips, and he snapped and three fingers tore away in a spray of sparks. She staggered with phantom suffering and drove the remnants of her hand into his skull, feeling the bone cave.

> There arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace.

The blistering heat set every nerve afire. It was all she could do to stay standing. Her skin was melting, the bone exposed and glowing. The floor //vaporised// where he stepped. She jackhammered her arm into his shoulder, drawing a growl of spite, and he charged forward, bowling her over, pinning her down with one limb.

> The third part of the sea became blood.

She twisted to the side, her sister crushing with their gaping jaws the pinning leg which bent and shattered even as half the teeth in her mouth broke, a detonation of hurt across her face. He swayed back in agony and she grasped for the handle of the sword, emerging from his stomach, and ripped it free. His entrails fell before him as he retreated, roaring: “TELL THE OTHERS WE WOULD HAVE WON WHEN YOU KILL THEM.”

No time for witticisms. She advanced and cut faster somehow, and he was weightier, less agile; the sword bit into his shoulder, dismembering one wing. He surprised her with another rush, jaws smashed with the butt of the blade so the bone hung limply.

> Out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.

He reared again and out of his mangled mouth came a shaft of light, the pure fire of desire, bright enough to part quarks. She twitched aside at the last moment and it excised a line through her ribs, half-bifurcating her; her sister went dead silent under the torment as she thrust the blade, itself citrine and aflame, up through his entrails, levering open his ribcage. She bounded into him and they fell rolling together.

> He was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

He raked open her muscle and fractured bone with greedy swipes. She slammed her mass into his chest, over and over again, until the skin, more bruise than body, abraded to reveal raw cartilage. He embraced her, limbs wrapping about her shoulders, and crushed until she felt her own core give in, and the sudden emptiness about her skin, her //real skin//, as the amniotic sac burst and she breathed the oil-wracked air within //Intentions//, felt the flame lick across her face, needles tearing out of skin fragile as paper.

//No time for hesitation,// declaimed her pitiless sister, so she put aside the oven-fire in her lungs and sheared through the tissue, closed her ears to the proclamations of Mammon, and tore out his heart with a heave. A vault, wrapped in stygian chains like sinew, trailing the seals of a billion contracts. All the souls he had ever won.

He begged incoherently, in the voice of the pharoahs, the diodachi, the three sovereigns and five emperors, and she crushed it in her fist. One-seventh of the tortures of Hell ceased.

> Babylon the great is fallen.

She luxuriated in the quiet, in the wreck of her body, the tang of the engine-wind on her tongue. Every critical subsystem was damaged. Half her motors no longer received power. She was immobile, fit for salvage.

She stood up.

//Eppur si muove,// smirked //Intentions//.

The rush of combat left her, and she sent all of herself down the line. The longing, the hope, the relief, that had carried her through that frantic last fight, leaving her only half-alive.

More than words, what came back was the promise that she was held, protected, cradled, never alone, no matter who //Intentions// had once been. //We should really discuss this,// she laughed, //Before it comes up again.//

For just that moment, she felt her body move as she willed, the slow synchronicity of it, and let herself relax.

> There was silence in Heaven for about half an hour.

-----

She came back, knowing and dreading what she would see. Forms twisted amid the ash, wreckage spread across the plain, the sky canopied by smoke, and where the camp of Tophet had been --

The commanders of the Global Occult Coalition Tartarean expeditionary force, negotiating the surrender of the princes of Hell.
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| previous-title = IRON EXORCIST, GOOD INTENTIONS
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| next-title = PAVE THE ROAD
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NON-CONTINGENT VIOLENCE

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