Chương 249: The Song Of Ruin [Helluva Boss/Hazbin Hotel] by JacobGreyson also known as James Golen in fanfiction.net
Words: 280k+
Links: -https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-song-of-ruin-helluva-boss-hazbin-hotel.1024820/
-https://m.fanfiction.net/s/14105747/1/The-Song-of-Ruin
( The Demiurge has revealed himself, and declared a vendetta against God. Hell is in turmoil as Lucifer -- now with a mere imp as his Proxy -- is surely planning a new war against Heaven, to reclaim the throne he calls his own. And those who are stuck on the battlefield have to find a way to survive.
This is not a story of glorious war. This is a story of how good men die when the status quo refuses to change.
Book 2 of The Silent God Duology. )
Chapter 1 Part 1 Act 1 Begins
The scream had a most particular quality to it, one that stood out starkly from all of the screams of its ilk which sounded in a constant wail of the damned that only occasionally had the basic decency to shut the fuck up. The usual scream was one of confusion, of terror, of fear. This was not that kind of scream. This was a scream not of disbelief and a bracing against impact, and pain, but instead had a particular cadence to it. Almost as though it were not an inarticulate howl at all, but instead a very pointed, very directed epithet levelled not at the ground of Hell which was rapidly streaking up toward its source, but instead at the Heaven which grew invariably farther away.
If you listened closely, you could have sworn that scream said: "YOU BASTAAAAAAARD!"
What typically followed was a deeply unpleasant, meaty thwap as the plummeting figure connected at great velocity to the ground, typically barren of such mercies as cushioning due to Sinners proclivity to land near where there are other Sinners, because, as the saying goes, Hell is other people. Most Sinners lived in the city. That meant that most newly Fallen tend to introduce themselves after cratering into concrete, asphalt, or somebody's roof.
This one, though, had uncommon luck. Luck, or perhaps something else. Because while this woman fell, and did indeed come perilously close to smashing spine-first through the glass of a conservatory, she instead landed directly beside it, and had her impact lessened by some tiny degree by a remarkably thick bed of dandelions under her.
Rachel was more furious than she had ever been in life.
She lay there in understandable and incredible pain, on the ground, glaring up at Heaven. This fury was new to her. Usually, her ire burned low and steady, the embers of a dying fire, and couldn't be stoked higher even by the most personal of betrayals. But this? This gave her wrath. At the audacity at the bald-faced hypocrisy of them. She knew that the best revenge was supposed to be living well. She knew that she was intended to turn the other cheek in the face of insults and attacks against her. But if there was one thing that could murder a belief in a benevolent higher power, it was actually standing in Heaven and seeing what had become of it.
"Holy shit, I t'ought I heard somethin'," a voice came from the conservatory. Rachel pressed her eyes closed, puffing out a sigh of pain.
"Ow," she said.
"You okay out there, doll?" the voice came again, nasal and seeming straight out of a mob-movie. Rachel allowed herself to continue to let out a groan, and then lifted one arm, to see if it was broken. It wasn't. Nor were her legs, as she tensed and flexed them. She was pretty sure the entire back of her was going to be a solid bruise in a few minutes, but considering she had plummeted at terminal velocity from Heaven, a bruise being the worst of her injury was something of a mercy. And it wouldn't last very long. She didn't Regenerate the way that the Damned did, but injury on the Innocent was a very temporary thing. "Fuck. Shit, I'll just put... Fine. Hold on, I'll get you, babe."
With a final, aching growl, she pushed herself out of the crater of green and yellow that she had landed nearly at the exact center of. Dandelions? Really? And where was... oh. Yup, that moon had a pentacle carved into it. There was a clock-tower in the distance that listed 61 days until 'next purge'. There was a blimp flying overhead that was advertising a new formulation of Krokadil that promised '40% less necrosis'. And there was another blimp, advertising methamephetamine, which was burning it out of the sky using a flamethrower. And of course, the wind turned that spray of naphta back on the attacking blimp, which caused both to plummet to the ground.
Rachel blinked a few times. Was this really?
Any doubts that might have possibly had a chance to develop in her were unceremoniously shot in the head and dumped into an open grave, because the figure who had come to her side was not even approaching a normal human form. He – if his voice truly pegged him as a he – was covered in very fine, white fluff that was marked with pink, his eyes both asymmetrical and heterochromatic. He had four arms, and was wearing an apron depicting two loves of bread that were boxing each other for some reason.
"...What the fuck are you?" the strange demonic being asked, looking her up and down in confusion.
"Did your mother raise you to introduce yourself like that?" Rachel asked, coughing and groaning as she finally got to a proper sit, feeling every welt and slightly-misaligned bone in her body. God damn, but that hurt. She was going to be careful not to mess around with ledges in the future. It wasn't the fall that was the problem, rather the sudden stop at the end of it, and she had no intention of revisiting that problem.
"Hey, fuck you, lady," the spider demon said. "I'm tryin' be helpful here."
"...right. Sorry," Rachel said. She had to moderate her tone here. They didn't know her ways, and she didn't know theirs. "I could use a hand."
"Yeah, I'm not doin' shit until you explain why you ain't changin'," all four of the spider demon's hands recoiled from hers.
"Changing into what?" she asked.
"You just got here, right?" the demon said. "Oh fuck me, you've just landed. Charlie's gonna want you on the double."
"Landed. Right. Because that...." Rachel trailed off, as her nose caught something. She turned back to the demon, and then sniffed. She pushed herself up to a hobble, which the demon recoiled a bit from. "I smell dough."
"Yeah, I was gettin' some herbs an' shit to make it fancy."
"You have food?" she asked.
"Why? You... actually yeah, you do look like you probably starved ta' death. Come on. I'll get some food in ya'," the demon said.
"Wait... why are you offering this?" she asked, trying to lean away but still not quite being physically up to it. If the Good could use people, Christ only knew what the Damned would do.
"Charlie, she's got a big heart, and likes to take in strays," the demon said. His face, for all its alien qualities, took on some softness, some tenderness. "She brings out the good in folk."
Rachel wanted to be clever about this, to think this through, but it felt like it had been months since she'd eaten anything – although the sad truth had been closer to eight years. The smell of food, food that she didn't have to by dint of her responsibilities ensure that went to another, was quickly shutting down her other faculties. She knew that she had about half of a conversation left in her before she started hunting down edible things and beginning to consume.
"I'm starving," she said. And gestured ahead of her.
"What's yer name, copper-top?" the demon asked her.
"Rachel," she said.
"Angel Dust," he offered a hand to her. She stared at it for a moment, unsure of his intentions. "Don't gimme that, I ain't no Dealmaker, I'm just bein' friendly."
"A friendly demon named Angel Dust," she said.
"And you're a dead asshole just like me, so you ain't go no place to bitch," Angel Dust said, not altogether unkindly, though. "Go on. And grab somm'a that oregano when you do. Imma make somm'a that fancy bread tonight."
"What is this?" she asked, as she was essentially escorted through the conservatory, which played host to strange, distorted plants that were alike, but not identical, to the ones she'd known in life.
"What'd'ya mean, 'what is this'?" Angel Dust asked. "What'd'sit look like? It's a fuckin' hotel!"
As they exited the conservatory and entered the halls, she could see exactly what he meant by that. "Right. And you, a demon, work in a hotel."
"The only soy-ten-tee in the afterlife is taxes, babe. And I earn my money on my knees an' on my back. This is a hobby."
Oh....kay? Spider demon prostitutes moonlighting as bakers. Hell was weird. And still not the strangest thing she'd seen since her death. "Well, I–" Rachel began, before stalling as she saw a werewolf through the doors that looked into the lobby area of the hotel. "...why is there a werewolf down here?"
"Ain't a were-wolf, doll. That's a 'there-wolf'," he said, and then cackled at his own joke. Rachel stared at the drolly chuckling spider demon for a moment, before remembering what Dieter had told her. Dieter, a Penitent, had spent four decades in Hell. And apparently Hellhounds were a lot more ambulatory than the stories had spoken of. The spider demon seemed to catch wise that she was staring quite blankly, so elbowed her in the side. "Learn to take a joke, Dame. Maybe you stand a better chance wit' him than I do. He don't seem to want nothin' to do with me."
Okay, not just a prostitute spider demon, but a gay prostitute spider demon. Rachel gave her head a shake, and kept walking. She knew she was 'supposed' to consider him four times an abomination. But at this point, any belief she ever had in the Catholic Catechism had been pretty much filed out to the last grain of dust. This was Hell. Hell had all kinds.
"I appreciate it, Charlie. I really do," the Hellhound said, his voice very soft and she would almost call it conciliatory. Despite his fearsome appearance, by the way he spoke you'd think him a harmless pup. "But I've already taken a room for a lot longer than I'd planned and I don't want to run out my welcome here."
"You're still welcome," a very tall blond woman with rosy cheeks and startlingly kind eyes told him, laying a hand on his shoulder. The fact that she was almost as tall as this towering hellhound threw Rachel, even though she was being guided toward a dining room by an eight foot tall gay prostitute spider demon, and she could see a three foot tall sprite of a girl vigorously cleaning the cracks in what looked like a recently refurbished bar area. "You don't have to feel like I'm giving you the bum's-rush. You're not a bum, and even if you were, you can go as fast or as slow as you want."
"It's just..." the Hellhound gesticulated for a moment. "I've got a brother, he's got a place. And it's time I started... I don't know. Being myself for the first time in my life."
"If that's how you feel, then I won't stop you," the blonde woman said, but gave the Hound's shoulder a squeeze. "But just know if anything goes wrong, you can always come back. Just 'cause you're not a Sinner doesn't mean we don't have lots of room!"
"Thank you. Really," The Hound said, then grabbed a piece of very out-of-date looking luggage and started toward the door. The tall blonde woman sighed, watching after him.
"Ahem," Angel Dust said. "What the fuck? I literally laid out that guy's lunch!"
"Somebody else will eat it," Charlie muttered, staring after him.
"Yeah. Maybe this one will," Angel Dust said.
"What do youuuu-who are you?" the woman said, turning toward Rachel, and having her expression brighten from doldrums to excitement in a heartbeat. She darted closer, extending a hand with perfectly manicured nails toward her. "I'm Charlie, and this is the Happy Hotel! You must be new, because you haven't taken your new form yet!"
"...I guess?" Rachel said, rubbing at her back, which honestly was already starting to hurt less faster than she thought possible.
"I found this chick cratered in the doyt outside the greenhouse. Bitch just landed here like a couple minutes ago!" Angel Dust said, presenting Rachel to 'Charlie' with a theatrical flair of his hands.
"Well that explains things perfectly," Charlie said, but Rachel could tell by the woman's inflections alone that she was either lying or omitting something. A lifetime of trying to figure out other people's heads taught her at least that much.
"Pleased to meet you. Is this place, like... a halfway house? A soup kitchen?
"
"Why would kitchens only serve soup?" Charlie asked, thrown by the question.
"It's a human thing, boss," Angel Dust said. "Cheap food you give to a fuckload a starvin' people. Capone did it all the time."
"I do not like that man," Charlie said, which gave Rachel two moments of consideration. One, because it implied that Alphonse Capone was down here, and two because the tone Charlie used spoke to something like brutal enmity, something she otherwise didn't show the slightest of.
"Yeah, I'm gonna get some food in 'er. You can talk to her after that," Angel Dust said.
"Why are you doing this?" Rachel asked.
"I gots debts I gotta pay," Angel Dust said.
"You don't owe me anything," Charlie said casually, but Angel Dust was already guiding her toward a dining room. Well, say a dining room, it was a room that had a few tables scattered around its periphery, which was dominated front and center by a massive brass propeller, one that had had chunks taken out of it, but was otherwise abandoned. And one of the tables had a meal fit for a body-builder on it.
"There ya go. Pull up a chair, chow down. I'll put some meat on ya' bones," Angel Dust said.
"I'm just... I can just," she pointed at the food, a quantity that she had never seen laid out for one person in all the years since she died. This amount of food was typically portioned out to feed ten, if not ease the pangs of twenty.
"Go nuts, I got, like, four otha' things going right now and the fuck am I gonna throw that out to the bums," Angel Dust said. He gently but firmly grabbed her shoulders, plunked her into a chair in front of the still steaming pasta, lamb, scallions and beets, and other less obvious vegetables of Hell's bounty. She had a moment, just a moment, where she considered saying Grace.
But Grace had abandoned Heaven long ago.
So without a word said, Rachel began to eat the first meal she'd had since 2013.
The Song of Ruin
Act One: Dolce Et Decorum
Chapter 1:
She Who Desires, But Acts Not
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