Chapter Text
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More Than One Hundred Years Ago…
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Malphas awoke to another shitty morning.
The Noble House of Malphas was a long and storied one, his family having designed the many manors, castles, and citadels of the Ars Goetia over the long millennia since the founding of the Royal Convocation themselves. The seat of House Malphas was no exception: a massive labyrinthian fortress that hung from one of the great pillars hanging down from the upper ring itself.
It was one of the largest in all of Envy and most, if not all, were jealous of how large and grand it was after thousands of years of various members of the house adding onto it and improving it. Twenty-seven floors, over two hundred rooms, a labyrinth of hallways and chambers that moved to the tune of whatever he wished… it was a grand manse that all the Ars Goetia adored.
Every bearer of the name Malphas, from the first founding when Hell was born to now, had been architects and masons, building wondrous mansions and castles for the fellow Ars Goetia who all threw precious gems and promises their way in return for making their homes and palaces the envy of all… well, Envy.
His room was an opulent thing of grotesque affluence, and he hated it. He very much hated everything about the Ars Goetia: the politicking, the betrayals, the lies, the blood feuds, the greed and envy… he hated it all.
But, and here the middle-aged goetic demon sighed in slight contentment, there were the upsides. Like the fact he could buy as many books as he pleased from wherever he wished. That… was about it. There was another upside but as of late it was sort of-
The doors to his chambers burst open as a massive owl-like demon strode in clad in red silk pajamas covered in runic sigils. A truly impressive pair of horn-like feathers rose up on either side of his head and surrounded a small crown set above blood red eyes that had swirling patters running off them through the skin of his face. Dark gray and black feathers covered what parts of his body the red silk didn’t as he strode in with all the power and grace of a high-class demon.
All the grandeur and grace were at odds with the simple tray of food he held in his hands. “I had the servants prepare us some breakfast.” Paimon, the undisputed head of the Ars Goetia, said with a nod as he sat next to him while laying the tray between them. “If it’s anything less than perfect, I’ll have them all flogged.”
-sort of a downside. Paimon, the head of the Royal Convocation and master of the Ars Goetia was… there was no easy way to say this, an absolute bastard of a man and yet he loved the scumbag all the same.
He just wished Paimon loved him back rather than seeing him as some sort of plaything.
They’d been together for years and years now, with Paimon and he being forced into friendship by their families way back in the day. He had been one among many for Paimon since the slightly older demon was above all others growing up and thus needed retainers from hatching. And yet somehow he and Paimon had made it work… it just so happened that he put more feelings into the relationship than Paimon did since the head of the Ars Goetia just… well, every time he tried telling the owl-like demon that he loved him, Paimon thought it to be the wind up to some debased sex act where the Owl-demon said all the things he wished he would say with meaning as some dirty talk routine.
Eventually, he stopped telling him all together.
“Ooh, these truly are great!” Paimon said with a nod, the taller demon digging into the food with gusto as he simply sat by him and wondered about everything. Paimon finally looked up and saw him simply sitting in silence and raised an eyebrow. “Is everything alright, Malphy? If it’s not to your liking, I can force the servants to make something else-”
“It’s fine.”
Pai kept his eyebrow raised and he sighed. “Pai?”
“Yes, Malph?”
“Do you…” He hesitated, not sure how to say what needed to be said. This would be… he had tried so many different times over the years to try and parse through Paimon’s feelings and if this didn’t work, well, he would go through with his last-ditch plan and hope for the best. “Do you ever want to just… run away?”
Paimon blinked. “Eh?”
“Like, just run away from it all: the pressure, the expectations, the lies upon lies… do you ever want to just run away somewhere nobody can find you and just… be someone else?” He was rambling now, decades of bottled-up thoughts running rushing out as he separated from his mask and talked. “We could run away, maybe go up to Pride and pretend to be sinners, and just… live.”
Paimon stared in silence.
He continued. “I’m so fucking tired of dancing around pretending we’re not in love-” Paimon raised another eyebrow, “-and I know we can’t be together while being in this horrible profession so why not run away and elope? No more pressure, no more expectations, no more-”
Paimon began to laugh. It was a hearty, full-bodied laugh that the slightly older demon practically cried from, his body shaking as he almost knocked over the silver tray of food between them.
“Oh Malphy… you really know how to cheer a demon up.” Paimon said and his heart swelled with joy at- “I didn’t even know I needed a laugh this morning, but your joke brought it out, so thank you.”
A cold feeling settled in his gut. It looked like once again he had failed to get through to the man. “My… joke?”
“Of course!” Paimon chuckled, his laughter dying off as he rearranged the food so it didn't fall. “Giving up the power and prestige of our houses for, what, some playtime as peasants? Oh, you shouldn’t give up your day job, but I will be sharing it with Gremory and her spouses, they should get a nice laugh out of thinking that the lower class is worth emulating.”
“Right… a joke.” He swallowed and looked Paimon in the eyes. “So… If I said I wasn’t kidding? That I hate my life and everything about being a member of the Ars Goetia? That I want to run away and own a small library and teach peasants how to read…?” He sighed in disappointment as Paimon laughed himself silly again, forcing down the bitter resentment.
Sometimes… sometimes it was very hard to love someone like Paimon.
“Oh, you are an absolute treat, Malphy! Ah, the thought of a Goetia actually giving it all up to slum it with the poor… ah, it tickles the sides!” Paimon, who didn’t love him outside of being some sort of plaything, nodded his head and stalked over to the dresser. “Now, come along Malphas. We have many things to do today: Marchosias just had his seventh divorce and we need to be the ones to set him up with his future eighth one before someone else does and gets access to his extremely flighty loyalty in the Convocation. Speaking of which, Mammon wants another redesign on the Cirque Du Capital: apparently it’s not green enough so he’s…”
‘Another damn day in Hell… I’d pray if I thought it would do anything.’
**********
Present Day…
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Malphas woke up to the best scent in the universe: Ink-wells and parchment paper.
He had made a nest out of trashy bodice-rippers in the forbidden stacks, wanting to be amongst his private and personal collection of books collected throughout the Isles this last century since his departure from the cold halls of Envy. He was happy now, happier than he had been in the centuries amongst the nobles of Hell.
Damn it, he had even found some people who cared about knowledge and literacy as much as he did! The very last building he had ever designed had been the Bonesborough Library, after that he had taken all his architectural tools and thrown them as far and as hard as he could into the Boiling Ocean- if he was ever asked to design another building for some snooty rich asshole he would walk into the sea and never be seen again.
A few paper imps came up and gave him his toothbrush and toothpaste: Oral hygiene was important even when you had access to healing magic. Not that he ever got a hand on Isles Magic, it was too complicated for him to get his mind around so he simply lied his feathery ass off and said his Infernal Powers were just Isles Magic with a different look.
After all, he was from a different Titan and had come here to see how this one did things.
The idea he was from the realm of Hell was… well, it was so unknown that nobody once thought that it was real. Nobody on the Isles even knew what Hell was in a biblical sense, nobody except one woman on this entire landmass having ever read the book in the first place, so his secret was safe overall.
He wondered how Gwendolyn Clawthorne had taken the book, though her naming her daughter Lilith apparently meant that she had been a fan. He had hesitantly asked her what she thought of it and had been relieved the then younger woman had thought it to be completely fictional.
That was safer than ‘AHHHH! DEMON FROM HELL!’’ so far as he was concerned though he would admit to being a bit uncomfortable by her wanting to start up a reading circle to discuss and critique the book from a storytelling perspective.
The older avian Goetia smiled as he finished washing his head feathers in the sink, his bargain brand conditioners making him clean enough for the general public. It was amazing what one could do when they simply used store-brand feather soft soap bought from the corner store rather than bathe in freshly made soaps crafted by the hands of underpaid servants in some forgotten plot of land up in Wrath that your house owned that was mixed with a delicate mead brewed in Gluttony vineyards for the sole purpose of chasing the latest trend because Beleth liked getting hammered in the mornings but didn’t like saying so and thus created an entire new trend among the Goetia so he could hide the smell of his morning gallon of Honey Wine by claiming he was mocking Heaven by bathing in milk and honey.
Everyone knew he was full of shit, and yet if you called him out on it he would use his position among the Goetia to bully your house down in the eyes of high society. And near-immortality with very long life meant that the Goetia got bored enough to try anything once.
He was so utterly glad to be done with it all.
His chosen attire was just as much chosen for comfort as it was chosen to piss off the high-brow assholes he had left behind so long ago: a simple dark robe he had taken up a sewing class to make himself with a comfortable shawl around his shoulders, a pair of half-moon glasses hanging off his beak while a simple cap covered his headcrest.
Overall, he looked exactly like he was: nothing more than a librarian.
He couldn’t be happier.
He stretched, his wings going out as far as they could as he cracked his aging back- being a Goetia Demon meant long life and hearty health, but time came for all- and rolled his head back and forth on his sinuous neck as he sighed in contentment.
He flew over his forbidden stacks, shelf after long shelf full of carefully curated knowledge that he had to unlearn hoarding like a miser so that all could enjoy the fruits of the Library. Paper Hell Demons moved from shelf to shelf as they managed and kept order among his bibliographic domain. Statues he had imported in to help with the ambiance stood tall like sentinels. Echo mice scampered to and fro, the skull-headed rodents tempted away from the important books by stacks of hastily printed off fanfiction from the Hexnet as they devoured the chosen stories and played them back as near-movies. He liked the little creatures, even if they annoyed him to no end when they managed to get into one of his more important books.
They avoided the books he brought with him from Hell like the plague though. Which was fine, those things were so chock full of infernal magic that he really didn’t want to know what would happen if they managed to eat a single page.
He flew down like a soaring eagle, summoning his book of Library records up from where it lay on the pedestal he made for it so he could ride it as a mount. He assumed a gentle and approachable pose as he smiled happily to greet the day once again in paradise.
He opened the doors from the Forbidden Stacks into the General Stacks and smiled as he rolled his shoulders. “Good morning Isles!” He chirped as he floated out, blatantly ignoring how he had slept in till noon again, and then blinked as one of his librarians rushed up. The older and glasses clad librarian he had been working with since Belos took power skidded to a halt before him, hands on his knees as the elderly witch took deep breaths as he rose up and stared at him in desperation.
“Sir, Tibbles tried breaking in again last night.” Alm, his faithful companion for many years now, said between gasps.
He sighed, of course his good day wouldn’t last and it barely started.
**********
“I want it to breathe fire out of the eyes, have webbing I can recline in like a throne, have several more vaults for my loot, I want it to have a second arena shaped like a snarling beasts head that is also a cruise ship… but this one I want to have flaming eyes and be made of solid gold…” Mammon, the Sin of Greed and Malphas’ personal nemesis for the next few months, kept rattling on and on about all the changes he wanted done to his governmental palace within Greed: The Cirque Du Capital.
The, and there was no easy way for him to put this, obese four-armed Sin marched with all the confidence of a ganglord as he gestured to the many hallways and chambers of his circus tent-like palace that, once again, he would have to redesign because Mammon was as flighty as he was greedy and cruel.
The middle-aged Goetia and chosen architect and home renovator for the upper classes by birth did not sigh, roll his eyes, or lament his lost reading time as he smiled at the Sin and tried to figure out how to tell his client, a client who could kill him with a waved hand, that his ideas were trash and this would be the tackiest thing he had ever produced.
But Satan’s palace of oppression known as Behemoth was now capable of slow and ponderous movement so of course now Mammon wanted his entire palace redone. Leviathan was redesigning theirs themselves but so far Mammon wanted his work and thus his weekends cooped up in his small and meagre library were now slowly fading away before his eyes.
Mammon was going off about all the little changes and big renovations the Sin of Greed wanted done and he had to resist finding a hard surface to bash his head against as the astronomical costs of this venture were going to cause him no amount of headaches. Not that Mammon cared, of course. Since that would require the Sin to actually give a shit about anyone and anything outside the chosen bubble he had declared ‘his.’
Lucifer’s Mercy, he actually preferred when Queen Beelzebub needed repair work done on her rather simple (for a Sin) mansion she wrecked every time she held a massive rager. One’s he had a standing invite to but never showed up for since he wasn’t the spring chicken he used to be.
A good book and a nice glass of wine were all he needed to have a good night. That and whatever Paimon wanted to do whenever the two of them had the time and energy for intimacy.
Not that Paimon understood the meaning of the word intimacy, being solely focused on his own pleasure at the expense of all else.
The middle-aged Goetia summoned a squad of paper imps to both hold up the book of records he kept about his architectural work but also summoned a paper incubus to write down everything Mammon was saying because he himself had long since started spacing out and that was a one way ticket to being circled by the proverbial sharks known as the Ars Goetia for screwing up a job when none of his ancestors did.
Oh, and Mammon would probably bring him an inch from death if not kill him outright for screwing up his palace. That would be… Well, he would miss his books, that was enough of a reason to stay alive.
“Still don’t know why you summon those stupid things when real imps are a dime a dozen.” Mammon shrugged, picking at his fangs with a single claw as he rolled his golden eyes and jingled his way down the hall, the large avian Goetia following behind him dutifully.
“I prefer paper demons to real ones, if I’m honest.” He said with a shrug. It was what it was, and he rather liked his powers, having learnt them from various books he had bought over the centuries-
“‘I prefer paper demons to real ones!’ Alright nerd, whatever you say.” Mammon laughed to himself and snapped his fingers. Immediately, an entire battalion of flesh and blood imps rushed out and started locking arms together till they formed the shape of a reclining chair that the Sin of Greed immediately sat upon and waved onwards. “Now, about the statues of myself…”
Before he could properly think about how to tell Mammon that the statues were tacky and that nobody would believe that the Sin of Greed had a twelve-pack and biceps the size of watermelons, an imp in butler's uniform walked up deferentially with a familiar silver mirror in hand. Paimon, now clad in his usual dress with a crown between his horn-like feathers as the red eyed Goetia smirked at him. "I suppose you're still busy then?"
He smiled back, though it was a brittle thing. "You know better than to bother me at work, Pai."
"Ah, but I miss my Malphy, so I decided to call and set something up for tonight." Paimon was looking down at his feathery hands as he spoke, and he perked up despite himself. Paimon? Actually setting something up? This was a nice change of pace because usually he was only focused on one thing.
"What did you have in mind, Pai?"
Paimon smiled and opened his beak and what flowed out was a wave of pure debauchery and debased filth so dirty and so utterly lewd that he stood with a dropped jaw at the sound. The imps making up Mammon's chair all looked as shocked as he felt and even Mammon paused and cocked his head to the side. The butler holding the silvery mirror just looked long-suffering as he listened with half an ear to his master's filth.
As for the Architect of Hell? He kept from sighing in annoyance only through sheer willpower because this was entirely on brand.
"-looking forward to tonight!" Paimon finished up and his image in the silvery mirror faded as the butler coughed into his fist and fled.
Silence reigned.
"Holy shit, glad I don't have to deal with that guy." Mammon spoke up after a moment, finally breaking the awkward silence as he sighed in annoyance.
**********
“Don’t you have, like, literally anything better to do?”
Tibbles the porcine demon squirmed from his position held up by papery versions of Mammon that Malphas much preferred to the real thing due to not ever talking even once. The vest wearing yellow demon glared at him and he just stared right back at the utterly unconcerning demon pest.
He had dealt with all the sins save The Morningstar himself, nothing in this world scared him after that.
“I want what is rightfully mine!” The yellow demon tried to snarl threateningly… if he were not two and a quarter foot tall and dressed like a pantless accountant. Tibbles kicked his hooved feet back and forth and tried to free an arm to shake his fist at the middle-aged Goetia. “Those stone tablets you have in there are the rightful property of Tibblet Tibblie Grimhammer the Third!”
“Says who?”
“Says me! And the papers I had signed before coming over here prove they always belonged to me!”
He sighed in annoyance. “Tibbles, dude… nobody is going to buy that. Even Belos would have cracked down on that and the only reason he even bothered to enforce laws in the first place was that the dude was pretty determined about murdering everyone everywhere.”
Tibbles suddenly looked smug, raising his voice so that the few witches and demons willing to listen to him on their way to work could hear better. “Oh, so I was right about Sovereign Clawthorne-Whispers? They really are a tyrant unwilling to listen to their subjects or enforce their own laws! Even Belos was willing to-”
He sighed as Tibbles went on another anti-republic rant, mostly just talking to pad time while waiting for… something. Honestly, the Goetia didn’t know or care, Tibbles was just too annoyingly loud and equally ineffectual to pose anything worth listening to.
The problem was that he just couldn’t bring himself to care, he had seen the depravations of the Goetia and kept his Library neutral during Belos’ regime, even managing to coop himself up with his books and some nice Elbow Moonshine while the Collector (and it disturbed him that the Collector gave off the same energies as elder angels, and would be something he got about to researching when he had the time) played God with the Isles.
And then Belos came back and possessed the Titan themself… somehow. Honestly, Raine and everyone were very vague about the specifics and to be honest, he was mostly just happy he didn’t have to pack up all his shit and go back to Earth where they could find him at any moment.
He had been a Goetia before he had been a librarian, and he had been in Hell before he had been in Bonesborough. He literally, from the bottom of his heart, could not bring himself to care about Tibbles or what he had planned.
“-and I will say it to their face that they are ignoring the constituency! That we are regressing as a society and-”
“Tibbles?” He interrupted, not wanting to deal with this any longer. “Why? Why are you like this?”
Tibbles paused in his rant, of which he didn’t know how much was real and how much was the small demon bullshitting to waste time, and the yellow pig shrugged in the paper Mammon’s arms. “Eh, I like snails.”
He paused, blinked, and then started looking between paper Mammon and Tibbles. “... fair enough.” The Goetia scratched his chin and looked the yellow pig over with a gimlet eye. “But seriously, why are you doing this today? Nobody listens to you rant anymore since you’ve pretty much scammed everyone in Bonesborough at least once… so why here and why now?”
Tibbles paused, looked up towards the sky, and then looked back with a grin. “Well, here because this is where a trio of dangerous criminals have taken up refuge and now because… well, I really do not like being screwed over.”
The Goetia had to resist sighing in annoyance as a few law enforcers marched up, members of the Guild looking annoyed as they made it next to the victorious looking pig demon. “Hey Malphas, how's it going?” One of them, a rather burly and squat looking fellow, smiled at him.
“It goes. Knowledge continues to flow out of here and many witches and demons continue to read. What more could anyone ask for?”
The enforcer laughed to himself, shaking his half-shaved head back and forth as he did so. “Well, for one, I could be back with my husband today instead of at work but to each their own I suppose.” The enforcer scratched at his unshaven chin and smiled. “But seriously Malphas, tell Cat thanks for helping my child get their library card. They’ve never been happier-”
“Ah, the enforcers, How wondrous!” Tibbles crowed and many groans were had by all. “They’re in there, arrest them now!”
He raised an eyebrow as the enforcer chuckled weakly. “Look, Malphas… I don’t want to do this but we’ve been looking for them for a week and a half now and we’re following up on every lead we have. So…” The enforcer coughed into a fist and sighed. “Do you happen to know where we can find three small demons with glowing bands above their heads?”
He stared, the enforcer stared right back.
“Ah, I might know what is going on.” He chuckled, centuries among the Royal Convocation making his poker face rather excellent. “A handful of nights ago we almost had a break-in when those dangerous anarchists wanted to steal my new artifacts, generously being kept here free of charge while Lilith Clawthorne and the Bonesborough Natural History Museum translate it, while under orders to smash up the place and cause a general ruckus.”
He shook his head. “They failed, naturally, and I suppose my new hirelings happened to peeve Tibbles somehow because now he’s done this.”
“Malphas, we still have to go and see for ourselves.” To his credit, the enforcer sounded truly apologetic.
On the one hand, this would mean letting Tibbles back into the library… on the other, if his sense of what time it was right now was correct this was going to blow up in his face spectacularly. “I will, of course, be happy to let all of you inside to see my new hirelings. Right this way.”
The Bonesborough Library may not have been built by him, or even been renovated by him (the very idea of performing any sort of renovation or architectural engineering on his own made his stomach churn) but he would admit to being more fond of the storied building than he was most- if not all- of the many mansions, castles, palaces, and fortresses he had designed and built over his long career in Hell. It was just a cozy place to be in.
He wouldn’t trade it for all the money and power in Hell.
Tibbles, of course, was staring at all the knick-knacks and artifacts he had collected to spruce up the place over his 95 years spent working the Library with an envious stare in between regaling the enforcers about how dangerous and unpredictable his three new hires were.
“... utterly deranged! They came for me they did, wanted to burn the whole library down- that’s why they’re here, in fact! We need to stop them before they can do any more damage!” Tibbles was laying it on thick, the yellow demon clearly wanting to get even from whatever nonsense went down between them.
It was the enforcers who noticed it first, the lead one with his unshaven face looking oddly as he kept moving towards his destination. “Uh, Malphas… why are we heading towards the Kids Corner?”
In response, he held up a feather to his beak and smiled before leaning over to look at the reading corner while Tibbles and the enforcers peeked over with him and watched the pig demon’s manipulations burn to the ground around him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Cat Everine, lovely young woman that she was, had taken to Amity’s former volunteer work with gusto as the bushy haired and tan skinned witch looked between the book and the small gaggle of children sitting enraptured before her. “We’re your friends and we want to help, said the tin boy with a yelp!”
Not that any of the children were paying even the slightest bit of attention to her, as they were all enraptured by Cat’s rather ingenious idea on how to put the Cherubs to work.
The purple lamb, Collin, was dressed much like though his purple clothing had been recently changed out with a pair of thick brown overalls with a pink button up beneath it. He had a fake binding needle in hand, a massive book randomly chosen from the Kids Corner in his other hand as the dressed up Cherub made a passable attempt at looking shocked much like the titular Otabin. His halo was covered by a large pair of fake rabbit ears Cat had brought in to help sell the image of Bookmaker Otabin. Even though they had no real choice in the matter, it was nice of the fallen cherubs to do this- and they were fallen, despite what they clearly believed.
That would be an uncomfortable conversation for later. Much later. Much much later.
“Otabin smiled and paced the floor, ‘I’ve never had real friends before.’” Cat read happily, turning the page even as the other two Cherubs made exaggerated movements. Cletus, the one who looked like a human toddler, was dressed in carefully constructed tin armor of which only some of it still had labels on. He looked like a rather dapper lad, the tin armor formed to look like a suit.
Keenie, the golden lamb, was dressed like a giant chicken with a stereotypical witch costume on. She was smiling even though it didn’t reach her eyes and her teeth were clenched tight… which made sense since nobody wanted to dress up like a giant chicken while children were present. The only beings in any reality who remembered humiliating moments about you more than the Ars Goetia were children after all.
“‘Then we’ll be your first!’ The chicken witch clucked.” Cat read out as Keenie, the long suffering golden lamb Cherub, made an exaggerated clucking motion, bending over to practically slam her head against the ground over and over before going back up and smiling as brightly as physically possible. The children all giggled and laughed while Keenie’s left eye twitched.
“Otabin couldn’t believe his luck!” Collin made an exaggerated look of shock, jaw falling open and eyes going wide as he looked at the children while slapping both his hands, still clad with a book and a fake needle, to his cheeks and accidentally hitting himself. The children still laughed along like it was all planned.
“So Bookmaker Otabin, surrounded by friends-” Both Keenie and Cletus came in to hug Collin on either side, the three Cherubs smiling at the gaggle of children as Cat finished up her story. “-bound a book of friendship… and that’s the end.”
The children cheered, Cat beamed, the three dressed up Cherubs looked either happy or at least not bad… and as one, the enforcers all turned down to look at the rapidly paling Tibbles.
“Dangerous Anarchists, huh?” One of them asked pointedly.
The head enforcer sighed as the unshaven witch looked up at him apologetically. “I’m really sorry about this, Malphas. We’ve… well, we have to follow every lead even when it leads to a dead end like this did.” He waved a hand and they left the Kids Corner, a few paper demons taking the protesting Tibbles with them.
He stared at Tibbles, and Tibbles managed to catch his eye just long enough for the Goetia to wink. Tibbles protested even harder now as he was dragged away. “I’ll have my revenge, Malphas! On you and those little parasites…” Tibbles ranted and raved as he was drug out of earshot and silence reigned once again.
He chuckled to himself… and then sighed. That was fun, but he was going to have to have a long talk with his new employees about maybe going about in disguises in the future.
**********
Malphas stared at the burning wreckage of what had once been a cult base.
Being summoned was a special honor for the Goetia, allowing them to spread their influence among the miniscule number of cults and believers who took a chance on the Book of Solomon and actually managed to summon a real demon rather than whatever nonsense the leaders would use special effects and sleight of hand to produce. This cult had stumbled their way into accidentally intoning the right words the right way despite their best efforts otherwise and thus he had been summoned.
It had been the usual fare: a sacrificed goat with some drunken revelry as the handful of basement dwellers celebrated their successful summoning while he just stared awkwardly and waited for an opening to make his leave and hunt down some human literature to take back with him to his manor. Yes, it was illegal to do so but on the other hand he was filthy stinking rich and thus above Lucifer's law of non-interference.
And then the cultists started dropping like flies. Apparently, the wine had been spiked with something and it turned them from a demonic murder cult into an accidental death cult. One of them fell in such a way that the many faux-wax candles were knocked over and set fire to the tapestries, thus starting a chain reaction that led to the entire building burning to the ground.
As he stared at the burning wreckage of the cult, a curious thought entered his head: Nobody knows I am here. He had been summoned while on the job and Mammon would probably keep the knowledge that he had been summoned to himself because he never gave out anything for free… so other than him, as far as everyone knew, he went up to Greed and nobody knew anything but that.
If he were to just disappear right now, nobody would be able to find him. He immediately dismissed the idea, not wanting to get his hopes up as he thought of all the ways this would go wrong and he wouldn’t be able to do it.
He couldn’t think of anything.
He paused, turned the idea over in his head, and had to resist screaming in joy as he realized he could just… leave. Leave and never look back. He could just abandon everything and go live among Humans for a few years until someone from Hell managed to track him down to ‘save’ him or someone from Heaven managed to track him down to kill him.
He could do it, he could just leave.
There was literally nothing holding him back except his books-
He paused and groaned, his books. He still wanted to have his books.
Damn it… unless…
**********
“Thank you again for letting us use the Library for the translations, Malphas.”
“Don’t mention it, Lilith.” Malphas said with a pleasant smile, his unease about the name of the Queen of Hell having long since abated through constant use over the years. Plus, it helped that Lilith Clawthorne wasn’t nine and a half feet tall with massive curling horns and a voice that was literally bewitching… and was also a natural redhead rather than a honey blonde.
The mature woman with bright orange hair streaked with silver and a pair of mismatched eyes smiled as she and the horrifying atrocity hanging from a wooden backpack on a side table both began jabbering together about both the potential history of the tablet itself and also whatever nonsense Hooty happened to be thinking about at the current moment.
He did not like Hooty, Hooty was… he did not know nor did he want to know what Hooty was.
The secret Goetia just shook his head and shuffled about, summoning books from the great returnal stack to check them over for potential damage and other threats. Most did not damage the books but the rare few who did seemed to go above and beyond in terms of damage.
He held books to be sacrosanct; they couldn’t betray you or demand that you redo the entire building you literally just finished. They also couldn’t talk down to you by assuming they knew more about architecture than you did, the jerks.
Lilith busied herself with the tablet, the ancient pictograms painstakingly translated from one dead witch language to a much more well known dead demon language and from that to a more modern academically preserved witch language to modern Isles Tongue.
He was happy for her but would have long since gotten annoyed and went on to something else by now.
He nodded to the horrifying bird tube, who nodded back, and left the archaeologists to their work as he went back into the library and busied himself with what he could. The afternoon sun was starting to dip and he had yet another late night of reading a good book from the Forbidden Stacks alongside a glass of wine before him.
He passed by Cat Everine, the tan skinned witch tying back her hair as the sun caught her crimson flower tattoos along the right side of her face and made them almost shine. Cat jumped to attention, actually throwing a salute at him as she smiled. “Malphas, sir!”
“Please don’t call me sir, it triggers memories best left forgotten.”
Cat nodded eagerly as the young woman walked beside the massive middle-aged Goetia, the two co-workers simply enjoying the smell of paper and knowledge around them.
“Why did you bring Tibbles and a squad of enforcers to the Kids Corner?” She finally asked after a moment.
He shrugged. “Enforcers wanted to see if the new hirelings were the anarchist trio on the run from the law… they sort of got mad at Tibbles for telling them that they were after seeing story time.”
“They are surprisingly adorable. I tried telling Keenie that and she looked like I had insulted her entire family line.” Cat said with a frown. The young woman just sighed as they walked past row after row of books. “Collin looked over the moon with joy, though.”
“He does seem like the type to like that, yeah.” He smiled as he summoned a good set of dictionaries to form into a chair, reclining on it as both employer and employee went side by side. He smiled, summoning a paper Imp that he sent scurrying off to summon Alm and the Cherubs. “They seem like a good fit?”
“Too early to tell, si- Malphas.” Cat corrected herself at the last minute and he nodded in gratitude. “Collin and Cletus seem like good fits but Keenie reads more like an incredibly angry person who is resenting something major.”
“Oh jeez.” He sighed dramatically. “If only we knew someone with anger issues she was working on that could help Keenie with things that was also dating one of my employees…”
Cat sighed. “Boscha… I don’t know.” She looked conflicted as she walked beside him, wringing her hands. “She’s… putting those two together will either be a disaster or a miracle and I don’t know which, and that kinda scares me.”
“What scares you?” Alm the librarian came over, the aging witch pushing up his glasses as he looked over the two of them. The paper Imp summoned to gather him and the others scampering off to grab the Cherubs. “Please don’t tell me that you’re letting Eda back in.”
“Not for all the snails in the Isles.” He grumbled, crossing his arms and looking away. “I will be dead in a ditch before I ever let Lord Calamity back into these hallowed halls.
“Careful Malphas, you’re starting to sound like my old principal.”
He stared. “Compare me to Faust again and you’re fired.” Alm and Cat laughed like he was joking, which he wasn’t.
Finally, the three Cherubs flew on in, the costumes they wore taken off in exchange for their normal wear. The paper Imp shredded itself back into pieces of a random book from a random shelf as it floated up into the leather bound tome far away. “Those things creep me out.” Cletus the Cherub said with a grimace.
“I think they’re cute.” Cat happily nodded, her bushy hair going wild. “I don’t know what they are but they’re really cool.”
“They’re damn nuisances is what they are.” Keenie grumbled angrily. She crossed her arms and glared hard at Cat. “Why did you dress me like a damn chicken?”
“It fit with your wool’s color scheme so I thought it worked.” Cat shrugged apathetically as she and Keenie began trading barbs at one another, Alm and Cletus looking exasperated by the whole thing.
A tugging at the end of his robe made him look down to see Collin smiling up at him. “I… thank you, sir. For everything.”
He felt warm as he reached down to ruffle the wooly head of the purple lamb cherub. “Don’t mention it, Collin.”
**********
Malphas hefted the massive sack full of books and tomes on his back, the Goetia making his way through the woods of a random human country. He had fled back into his estate to take as many books as he could fit into a sack and then fled the coop as soon as possible.
The best thing about having nothing but paper constructs as servants for his main house? It meant that when you decided to leave forever nobody was around to go blabbering about it. It also meant that Paimon, who only called when he wanted to bang or do politics together, wouldn’t notice for a while that he was gone.
The sky was overcast and the color of darkened slate while he shuffled from place to place slowly making his way onwards towards… somewhere.
He hadn’t thought of this further than ‘I need to get the hell out of Hell.’ and acted accordingly.
He shuffled onwards, his sack of books keeping him from flying or even going at more than a simple shuffle as he made his way towards a better future. Maybe he would be a cave-man, Or a cryptid, or a mysterious sooth-sayer that humans ventured out into the deep woods to take advice from only for most of them to not believe he existed.
His options were limited, but fun.
He whistled as he walked, moving beneath the trees while a few wisps he had summoned for light went with him, casting soft rays out across the ground so he knew where to put his feet. This is why he flew everywhere either on his wings or floating on a book. Walking was for peasants.
He wondered what he would do when he finally decided to stop and figure out step two when the ground started to give away beneath him; being a massive avian Goetia with a very heavy sack full of many heavy tomes, books, and scrolls made for not the lightest of steps.
Something he figured out when the ground finally gave out and he went tumbling into a dark sinkhole. It wouldn’t kill him, or even damage him much, but it might damage the books and he had spent too long and too much on trying to keep them on his person so he tried to angle himself back around the massive book sack.
He barely had time to wonder why there was a pool of water at the bottom or why said pool was glowing and had red trees sticking out upside down underneath an orange sky showing off in it…
**********
Malphas idly sketched in his book of records as he watched his employees interact.
It was nice, ever since Gary got too up in years due to having several mental breakdowns during the Collectors reign. He did not like having only two employees so this was good for him. The three fallen ones would be a good investment, though currently they were slightly less than ideal but he knew Cherubs, knew they would end up better than most.
He just needed to let them shine.
The problem was that he needed to let them grow into their better selves and that would need some serious effort. He would outlive most people as a Goetia but… well, he would admit that he wanted some companionship that lived about as long as he did. Not that Cherubs lived as long as Goetia, but they at least lived longer than Witches and Isles Demons. And having company around that hated Hell just as much as he did (if admittedly for different reasons) would be nice. He missed just bitching about things with Paimon, who would listen and bitch right back as the two demons complained about anything and everything together.
Pai... he missed Pai a lot sometimes, but the longer time went on the more he realized that it was probably for the best. He and Pai hadn't worked out at all and thus this was the best possible solution.
He sighed and pinched the skin between his eyes, this was going to be annoying getting the Cherubs up to Boiling Isles standards... but as a runaway demon he would help the runaway fallen angels as best he could.
But at least Tibbles wouldn’t be a problem, not that he could be even if he tried.
Malphas, former member of the Ars Goetia and current head librarian of the Bonesborough Library, rolled his shoulders, pushed up his sleeves, and got to work.