Chapter Text
The revolution had been fast.
In hindsight, Stolas, once a Prince and now less than nothing, supposed it made sense. There was no way the lowest castes of Hell, the Imps and Hellhounds, would have won a long-term battle.
It hadn’t been like that.
It had been one night.
He had gone to sleep a Prince, and woke up bound and gagged in Angelic Rope, his world upended, everything he had always known swept away.
Later, in the cell where he was confined, he learnt it was the same for all the members of the Ars Goetia, at least the ones lucky enough to wake up at all. He pierced it piece by agonizing piece, as he sat in silence. None of the Kings and Queens (save Asmodeus, whose status as a Sin spared him) had survived. Of the twenty-six dukes, only six remained. He was one of three Princes spared, of seven once standing.
There seemed to be a pattern, with more Goetians surviving the lower in the rank you went, though that didn’t explain why all the adults who were not members themselves, children and siblings and spouses, had been killed. Perhaps, Stolas mused, it was to avoid possible problems with revenge-seekers.
He should feel terrible to have lost his father, King Paimon, maybe. But when he overhead one of the captors off handing mentioning how a certain “Blitz”, one of the heroes of the Revolution, had snuck into three of the Kings’ palace and killed King Bael, Queen Beleth and King Paimon in one single night, he had felt nothing.
Perhaps it had been better than when he had looked at the dead body of Stella, his wife.
Then, even in that horrible night, he had felt relief.
-
Stolas woke up with something sharp on his neck.
He opened all his four eyes at once.
Several pairs of yellow eyes looked back at him. That wasn’t what made all his muscles lock and his heart turn into an ice sculpture in his chest.
One of the creatures (they were all similar, all dark against the darkness, and he could see very well indeed but he didn’t care to) had his little Starfire in its burly arms, a hand on her tiny beak, and a shiny, angelic steel pistol pressed against her head.
“Now, Stolas, you’ll behave, or you’ll have your daughter’s brain all over you.” A breath of air against his feathers. He hadn’t shivered in so much disgust since the last time he had to share more than a bed with his wife. “Up to you.”
Octavia’s eyes were as wide as moons, as terror-stricken as the little mice he used to hunt for fun as a nestling in the corner of the garden, before his father’s butler caught him and explained to him how that was unbecoming of a Goetian.
“I’ll behave.” He replied. As if he could do otherwise. His own heart hammered in his chest, but he tried to smile to his daughter, his little Starfire.
“Wise choice.” That whisper, again, and a chuckle, and a rattle behind him. A whisper of… something passed on his neck, and for a second he wondered if it was a scrap of fabric, or a rope, and he was about to be garroted and oh please, not in front of his daughter…
Something clicked behind him, and Stolas was falling.
He wasn’t, not really, of course, he wasn’t moving from the bed, his bed, the bed he had slept since he had memory, but it felt like it, like an implosion, like a star having used up all its fuel in its greed, all the hydrogen and helium and heavier elements, all of it until they are imploding and falling, falling inside themselves, falling into nothing, nothing and then…
He sat up, heaving a great shuddering gasp as he chocked and breathed in, his muscles seizing and sputtering, tears streaming on all his eyes. He wheezed, feeling his lungs seizing and he spat bile and mucus. Then he was curled on a ball on his front, panting, the coldness inside him reasserting itself into organs and muscles and bones, his eyes and ears taking their shapes again, and he could see and ear and breathe and be Stolas.
“Uh, this one will survive” said a rather lazy voice. “it figures.”
Stolas cleaned his beak, his eyes on the blanket, and breathed into lungs that felt scorched on the inside. He didn’t need to call upon his magic to know he had none.
He looked up, his eyes searching for his Starfire. She was as tense as a little board, her eyes completely round. Terrified.
The gun was still against her little head. His newly reformed stomach turned. He almost asked them to stop, but what if saying it wasn’t necessary to threaten her anymore made them… hurt her?
“Up, Prince.” The word was a taunt. “We are going. And put on some clothes, nobody needs to see your twig body”
Stolas tried to find his legs under him, put on his red robe and slippers, and stood. He wobbled. He extended his arms toward his daughter, looking at the hellhound who was holding her in the eyes. The creature looked back at him, considering, then shrugged and gave Via to him.
Via sobbed as he held her to him, as tight as he could. She felt heavier, though he couldn’t say if it was because of his general lack of magic, or a result of whatever had happened when they put… whatever it was on his neck.
He had repeated the same word. His mind was groggy.
“Walk.”
He walked, caressing his Starfire’s back. Stumbled would be a more accurate description. The palace was eerily silent. He hid Via inside his red robe, her face inside his neck. She was trembling so much. He said nothing.
It was at the foot of the staircase, that he saw her.
Stolas stared. Stella had always seemed so… invulnerable. Like she could scream death down. But she hadn’t been, had she?
Because she was there, in the foyer, with a bullet in her head and a pool of black blood under her. Oh dear. She would hate to get it out of her white clothes.
Stolas knew he wasn’t thinking straight.
He looked at his wife. Ex-wife. Is it an ex-wife when you are a widow?
Something hard, cylindrical and with a hole in the middle prodded his back. “Walk, princely.”
He walked, hiding Via’s face so she wouldn’t see the corpse of her death mother.
Stolas walked out of the palace that had been his home since he had been an egg in his red robe and pink bunny slippers. He didn’t know then he would never walk in again.
If you had told him, he wouldn’t have been surprised.
-
The only saving grace was that nobody had tried to part him from Via.
The cell was… a cell. It wasn’t big. It did have a bathroom though, with a shower and a toilet. There was only one bunk, and he slept curled around his owlet like five years ago, when she had still been an egg and, despite Stella’s protest, he had loved to warm her up with his own body. They were given food, enough for two, of a kind they could eat, Stolas guessed three times a day, and soap once every seven days.
So, it had been two weeks. He tried to keep a routine for his Starfire. Waking up, eating, singing, doing some physical and mental exercises, more eating. There was a window high up on the wall, and in the evenings he would let her stand on his shoulder to see the sky darkened, and they would talk of what constellations would be in the human world right now.
She was all his world, always.
Nobody had been particularly cruel, neither. There hadn’t been blows, or torture. From what Stolas had gathered by listening in the night (the night guards were chattier), it was mostly because he hadn’t put up a fight. Others hadn’t been that lucky.
He couldn’t put up a fight. What would happen to his Starfire, if something happened to him?
Stolas got some names, too, of the Revolution’s Leaders. The Blitz guy came up a lot, together with another, a Striker who had been the one to come into his own palace. Or what had been his own palace. Apparently, now most of the Goetia were either dead or in prison like him, and they were discussing with the Sins themselves. By what Stolas heard, it was mostly Satan that was holding back, the others having given up on the Ars Goetia, and even Satan seemed to hold on due to his resentment that “his creatures”, the imps, weren’t “behaving as they should have”.
Stolas wasn’t surprised.
One morning, about two and half weeks after their imprisonment, he woke up to fireworks going in the middle of the night. He woke, and went to the window, and looked out, and felt what little hope he had had shrivel and die within him. He turned toward his daughter, who still slept curled like a chick in the egg on their singular bunk bed under a blanket too thin to be called so, and knew he would die before he would allow anybody, anything to lay a hand on her.
The day after, they came for him.
-
In the last two and half weeks, Stolas had had reasons to be vaguely annoyed at his past self for his choice of attire. While the red robe and bunny slippers were comfortable at home, especially the second one were not what you wanted when you were a prisoner in some heaven-forsaken cells.
The bunny slippers in particular had been rendered utterly useless in the walk between the garden and the portal the “Revolutionaries” had set up to bring him… whenever this place was. He had tried to clean them from mud in the bathroom, but he had never been taught how, and his attempt had only been useful at making Via giggle, which was a very great use, but also left him baretaloned.
So it was that, when the door of their cell opened, Stolas stood in his red robe and nothing else, and looked at the two hellhounds who came in with, he noticed, normal weapons. He had assumed angelic steel would not be necessary anymore to wound him, and this was a sort of confirmation.
Oh, well.
“Stolas. Come with us.”
Via clung to his robe. “My daughter.” He said, levelly, putting a hand on her head. One of the hellhound, a female, looked at him with some more pity than the other.
“You don’t want her where you are going.”
Ah. So they were going to execute him, in the end. His free hand clenched. Who would take care of Via? “She…”
“She won’t be harmed.” The other hellhound spoke, brusque. Stolas didn’t believe him, not for a second. He looked at them, wondering if he could strongarm between them, run with Via in his arms, but in his heart he knew it would be futile, and a stray bullet could hit Via as well as him.
Her chances were better without him.
He took a deep breath and knelt in front of Via, putting his hand on her shoulders. “Daddy needs to go with them. I love you, Starfire. Behave, alright? I’ll… come back to you, if I at all can.” He preened her crest.
“What the fuck is taking so long in rounding up the rich fuckers? Christ on a stick, there is left what, thirty of them?” He ignored the crass voice, even when it came closer. “Cuan, Wulfthryth, what the H-“
A pause. The two hellhounds were shifting, Stolas didn’t care. His daughter was sniffling in his arms, weeping, clinging to him “Daddy don’t go, please, please.”
“… Toads and frogs.” The voice spoke again, low, so low that Stolas wasn’t sure he had heard it and wouldn’t know what it meant if he had. Then “This one can take longer.”
And the voice was gone.
One of the two hellhounds, Cuan or Wulfthryth, the female, touched his shoulder. He didn’t turn. “If you don’t antagonize anyone, you’ll be back to get her.” She whispered, and then the other one snorted, and said the only thing that would have made him believe them.
“Yeah, you may not like it, but you’ll be back to get her.”
-
Leaving Via was worse than… whatever they had done when they had put that thing on his neck. Stolas had started to call it The Collar. There was no mirror in his cell, so he didn’t know if it was a collar. It felt more like a piece of fabric than anything else, but he could feel it with every breath, and he knew angelic magic when he felt it.
But he went.
As he marched on in what he recognized as other branches of the same stone prison, he noticed other people he knew, by sight if not well, joining him, escorted by more hellhounds and imps. Lion-headed Foras, Haage with the body of a minotaur and the wings of an eagle, and dark-skinned Kimaris, and others. He was the only Prince, or who had been a prince, until he spotted Sitri, but his heart lurched when he saw the wounds on his shoulders and back, and one of his wings laid broken and unfixed, the bones clearly snapped and left as they were. He would never fly again.
Stolas looked down at his own bare talons. He didn’t want to see anything more.
“Into the portal, all of you.” He didn’t look. He went. His heart felt like lead in his chest.
He felt more than see the opening of the space around him. He looked around.
It was the Pandemonium, the space where the trials of Hell were set, and where the Sins sat in judgment. But there were no Sins in their dais. Instead, on in-between places, four people, three imps and two hellhounds, sat.
Stolas looked up, noticed that, and looked down again.
“Move. Make space for all your fucking kin.”
He blinked, doing as he was told. Doing as he was told means he could come back to Octavia, maybe. That was all that mattered. Coming back to Octavia.
Stolas moved as he was ordered. When the voice of a Hellhound he didn’t know barked a “kneel” order, he was among the first to drop on his knees. The ground was hard. He put a piece of his robe under them.
He heard some grunts as others needed to be, he assumed, “convinced” to do the same.
Stolas wondered, idly, if Stella, dead Stella, had been right, and he was a pathetic excuse for a Goetia and for a man, but he didn’t care. He would be as pathetic, as weak as he needed to be to go back to his daughter. He would swallow all his pride for her. Do anything, anything at all.
“Well, I see we are all here.” The voice was the same as he had heard earlier in the prison. He didn’t raise his eyes. “So, let me be very clear here. You are all that is left of the Ars Goetia. All adults who did not have magic have been killed.” Stolas had known it, heard it from the guard, but he heard gasps from people who, he assumed, didn’t know. He spared a thought for them. “The children have been spared because it isn’t their fucking fault they came from your rotten stock. Now, about you. We would want to have you just dead and let all your fucking unearned magic just go back where it came from BUT, that did create some problems, so we have an… alternative… solution.”
Something told Stolas he would not like it.
“You are going to be paired with one of ours, so that you can’t wiggle away or think of getting your shit ‘back’. Before you get back to your comfy cells, we are going to call dibs on y’all, and then…”
The voice trailed away and the other, deeper one, the cocky one what had been in his bedroom the night everything fell apart, snorted. Stolas had memorized the piece of the ground in front of him, could draw it with his eyes close, every nook and cranny, every single pebble and grain of sand.
“Stop being a softie, Blitz. Yer going to be our fucktoys. “
Stolas jolted, and by the feeling around him, he wasn’t the only one. Their what?!
A snort.
“As Striker so nicely put it, the magic requires us to fuck you all at least once a month, on the Full Moon.”
“Though myself, I’ll have fun more often than that”
“Suit yourself, you fucking horny snake. But that is how it is going to be. You are not going to die. We need you alive, and we don’t care if you like it or not. Whatever you’ll live chained to a fucking bed or as somewhat free people will depend on your behavior and what your Master or Mistress decides. So, I suggest you start behaving real good, real fast.”
There was a hint of… something. Distaste, perhaps, in the imp’s words. But Stolas was too far gone to hear it. His head spun. The familiar ground in front of him blurred. The sensation of unreality he had been living in the last two and half week grew stronger.
This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t. It was a dream, and he would wake up and Stella would be screeching at him for some reason and…
“And just to show you all what happens if you decide you have a right not to want this, let me show you our little prototype. Come on, Andrealphus, show your friends how pretty you look.” The snake’s tail rattled as he spoke, and there was a purr in his voice. At the name of his brother-in-law, Stolas lifted his head and looked on, and all his feathers stood on end.
Andrealphus had been portaled in the center of the room, so that all the kneeling Goetian could see him. The snake, Striker, was pressing his tail on the peacock’s shoulder, making him kneel.
Andrealphus was dressed in a mockery of his usual attire. The flowing cape with its fluffy collar was there, but his gown was not, and he was utterly bare under. A little chain went from the collar down, towards his cloaca, whose delicate folds were spread by leather tongs anchored to a metal belt at his hips. The chain stopped at the belt, and then another one, identical, went further down, connecting to a hinted plug. Andrealphus was blindfolded, his arms clearly bound behind his back, under his coat, and a gag was set in his beak, droll dripping from it.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
No, the worst part was the slick coating the inside of his thighs, the trembling of his limbs, the panting. The worst part was that when the snake took his crest in his hand and tugged, Andrealphus moaned high and true and Stolas felt a pulse of shame, because the sound made his own cloaca clench, in spite of the horror that made his palms sweat and his beak numb.
“As you can see, we aren’t heartless. We’ll make sure you all like it. Love it, in fact.” The snake was behind Andrealphus and his tail was drifting, drifting down, lazily, toward Andrealphus’ spread cloaca and Stolas knew he shouldn’t look, shouldn’t be complicit in another debasement (even if that other was Andrealphus) but he was sickened and he was cold in his heart and he couldn’t look away.
The tail’s tip toyed with Andrealphus’ entrance, and the peacock moaned again, high and needy and desperate, his hips jerking toward it, his body almost limp against Striker’s. Stolas wondered, dizzily, if they were using some kind of magical sound enhancer, because he could hear the wet slide, how ready Andrealphus was.
“At least during the Full Moon.” The other imp, Blitz’s, voice was almost bored. Stolas wondered why the other three didn’t speak. Probably, it was rehearsed. He would think about everything not to think about what he was witnessing right now. “Though if you make yourself as unmanageable as the peacock had, we’ll be forced to use stronger measure. So I suggest y’all to behave.”
Striker laughed, and Stolas knew what the humans feared in its kin. “Speak for yourself, Blitz. I am enjoying this.” He was. Oh, fuck. He was tugging the plug out, and Andrealphus made a chocked sound, shacking, and Stolas could almost see the way his cloaca winked, attempting to kiss nothing, clenching around nothing, and he could see that yes, that snake was enjoying it, if the clothed cock between Andrealphus’ legs was an indication, and the peacock whined again and pressed against it, his cloaca searching for…
“Tell them what you want, ice queen.” The gag fell on the ground, and Andrealphus gasped, panting. “They are all here. Tell them what you want. Now.” The snake pressed his captive’s head down, grinning.
“I want your cock.” It was a gasp, croaking and true and so full of lust, Stolas’ head was spinning, spinning, “Please, please fuck me, Striker, please, I need it. Fuck me, please.” He was babbling, and the snake chuckled darkly, dragging his clothed erection on the peacock’s cloaca, making him whine and beg…
“Well, since he is so nice, I’ll give it to him.” And Striker’s cock was free, and Andrealphus moved, and then Andrealphus screamed as he was speared, his lithe body shacking as he moved to answer each of the snake’s brutal trusts.
Stolas closed his eyes.
It didn’t surprise him to know he was crying.
If there were more words, he didn’t hear them.
-
It turned out all it was necessary to turn a relatively free person into a slave was a branding and an injection, though the latter was admittedly injected directly into their spine, close to their head, where their brain and spine met. The branding was too small and intricate to see the specific of, and it too was put in the same place on their body.
Who would have thought.
They were put in order of powers, a single line. None of them had spoken after the little show. Stolas had assumed they were all as shocked as he felt. He felt sick, too, and weak, and shivery, and nauseous.
In front of him, he could see the remaining dukes, and learnt that the surviving ones were Vassago, Amdusias, Bathin, Saleos, Crocell and Murmur. He was glad to see Vassago and Amdusias living, though perhaps death was better than what was in store for them. Only he and Sitri with the maimed wing were in line for the Princes. He went first. It wasn’t bravery.
He just wanted it to be done quickly.
Some, of course, tried to fight.
Stolas wasn’t surprised to see Vassago going kicking and screaming and being held down by four burly hellhounds. He had always been brave. Other begged. Saleos did. He tried to say he would serve, there was no need, he would always obey. He knelt and it was even more pathetic that he, Stolas, felt.
Stolas looked away.
When his turn came, Stolas did neither. He knelt, and lowered his head, and waited, looking at nothing, thinking of Octavia, his stomach sick and his eyes wet, his hands on his thighs. He didn’t cry.
It wasn’t as painful as The Collar had been. He was put on the side, feeling mostly… cold, and nauseous, and he could smell the burnt feathers and his head swam so much that all the colours seemed to swirl together into a tornado of reds and blacks and blues. He closed his eyes tight, welcoming the pleasing black. Octavia. It was almost done, and he could go back to Octavia. She must be terrified…
“I want that one.”
“Which one?”
“The owl prince. I call dibs.”
If he hadn’t been sure that opening his eyes would mean vomiting, Stolas would have.
“You can have whoever you want, you know that. Sure you don’t want more?”
“One is going to be enough.”
A hand on his arm. “Come on, owl. You aren’t going back to the cell. You are going with Blitz.”
NO!
For the first time, Stolas fought. He kicked the hellhound, and then his head swam, and he fell on his side, his shoulder hurting him painfully. He turned, opened his eyes, but everything looked like an oil panting in which somebody was still adding on strokes of colours. He stood up, and tried to run.
“WHAT THE F-“
Somebody tried to catch him, but he managed to dodge. He lurched toward the portal he could see, vaguely, morphing up and down and sideways, the portal where he could see the grey of the cell blocks he had been imprisoned for weeks, where Octavia was, and sprinted, half falling, half running toward it.
“WHATCH OUT!”
He could have made it, perhaps, he was almost there, almost touching it, Vassago and some of the others already on the other side, when he slipped, and fell, and then somebody was on his back, and he screamed and fought like the demon he was.
“What the f- WHO IS OCTAVIA?! OUCH the bastard BIT me!”
“His daughter.” A voice he knew, one of the guards, he didn’t care, he managed some more precious inches toward the portals, dragging the weight of the person trying to pin him down with him. “his daughter she is like what, four, five years old?”
“I’ll take her, too.”
Stolas stilled, panting, realizing there was the scent of vomit, and then realizing he had vomited on himself somewhere during the fight. With some sort of sick satisfaction, he realized he had also vomited on the one pinning him down. Ah. Served them right.
“Hey, Blitz, kids weren’t part of the deal.”
“Christ on a stick, Striker, try not to be an asshole just because, won’t you? Fine, I’ll take the assignment on the Tear in Wrath, how does that sound?”
“… the big one?”
“The big one.”
“Permanently?”
“Permanently. You back me and Barbs on this, and I’ll take the Wrathian Tear on. What do you say?”
“Fuck, get the kid, what do I care? Enjoy your time fighting Voidlings in Wrath, Blitz!”
Stolas blinked, still on the ground, listening as hard as he could. Seeing was hard. He could listen. “Get him his kid. And then, bring them both on the Wrath Fort. We are going to be living there henceforth.” The voice, Blitz’s, snorted. “This is going to be SO much fun.”
Stolas didn’t know, exactly, what had just happened, but he knew one thing.
He wouldn’t be parted from Octavia.
And that was everything that mattered to him.