(Warning.. violence)
The worst day of my life was a beautiful one. Perhaps it was to compensate in some small way for what was to come, or perhaps it was to provide a pleasant set for those who were about to leave the stage. Or perhaps it was all just blind coincidence.
I sat in the sun by Wilson's grave, a small open area in the centre of the palace. Beneath the shade of the marijuana crop which we had planted in his memory, I sat reading a treatise on the problems of recording television signals from an electrical engineering journal I had bought on Earth.
There were a pile of other magazines, including one titled 'The Dr. Atomic Pipe and Dope Book' which Wilson had left to Azrael.
Absorbed in this study I was suddenly distracted by a scream from inside the palace. Rushing inside, I was wholly unprepared for the sight which met me. One of the palace guards, a polecat, lay dead with a crossbow bolt protruding from his chest. Three weasel demons stood over him, one was preparing to reload and the other two were covering me.
"I don't want to kill you," said their leader, "but I will if I have to. If you stay calm and do what we say, I'm quite happy to allow you to go into exile once we have taken control."
I almost laughed, but it caught in my throat when my eyes glanced back to the polecat they had murdered, a promising young guardsman. For a moment I thought I saw a dim figure standing over his corpse out the corner of my eye, but when I turned to look it was gone.
"We should kill the incubus," said one. "It will prove to Page that we mean business."
"Who is the leader?" barked the weasel, subduing his minion. "The guard will prove that adequately. We'll give them a chance to cooperate first, and then kill him if Page refuses to abdicate."
Suddenly, Page opened the door behind them. This startled them and before anyone knew what had happened, the leader had fired. In under a second, Azrael's face went from his usual carefree expression to surprise and then finally to disbelief as the bolt struck his chest.
Forgetting the danger, I rushed to where he fell and cradled his head gently. He looked up at me in surprise, and said "See you later.".
I am a wolf, a predator. Millions of years of evolution have fine-tuned my senses and hunting instincts. Only comparatively recently has it become necessary to hide these urges so that we can partake in society with what would once have been prey races, but they aren't gone. They're still in there, deep down, below the surface. One crossbow bolt through the heart of my closest friend and they all came flooding back.
Pain and terror aren't my primary emotions, but I learned to make use of them anyhow - it was a compulsory module at the Succubus and Incubus Academy. At the start of the course, my Professor, Destania, remarked that emotions were like any other kind of food. "You can harvest them like fruit," she said, "gathering what you come across by passive absorption. But that isn't the aim of my class. I am here to teach you to hunt red meat, to actively look for a victim and to squeeze every last drop of pain and fear from them before they die. That is what we will be studying in this module."
There are things which they teach you at SAIA, horrible things. Ways to maximise the terror of your prey as you tear them apart. Amongst these are a number of strategies to alter your appearance, to make yourself seem more threatening and terrible and I knew these off by heart.
I had found them most useful to prevent confrontations by scaring away my foes, although this wasn't the reason we had been taught them. But the professor would certainly have approved of what I was about to do now.
My pelt turned a shade or two darker. I grew two feet taller and my eyes burned red as a feral snarl tore from my throat. I was utterly beyond reason, and if there was ever any doubt at all of my demon heritage, there could be none now. The lead demon had already loosed his bolt, and he wasn't going to get a chance to reload - not now or ever again.
With eyes like slits, my wing-tentacles emerged at a shocking speed, slicing the strings of all three crossbows, breaking the leader's leg and finally dragging him back towards me as the others looked on in horror.
"No," he whispered as I brought him to face me, my eyes boring into his as the wing tentacles lacerated his chest. Tentacles can do many things, you know. They can be sharpened to points, or flattened into knives.
A favoured technique for disposing of adventurers is to simply curl your tentacles around the neck and lop the head off in a single motion, the way a child might do to a dandelion. Or you could simply extrude the tentacles to a point, instantly impaling your victim through the heart. I might have done that, given him a quick, clean death - had his victim been anyone other than my dearest friend and mentor.
When his spine broke I dropped the demon's lifeless, wide-eyed corpse with a peal of insane laughter and a feral grin of exultation on my face.
For some reason the two surviving weasels had actually stayed to watch as I slowly filleted their late comrade. When I turned my attention back to them, wild-eyed, wired on an overdose of pain and coat gloss-red with the blood of my victim, they suddenly realised that this course of action was ever-so-slightly threatening to their own survival.
I pursued them, howling like my feral brothers on the open plains, but demons have the ability to vanish into the shadows and I lost them. That didn't matter. They were going to die anyway, and they knew it.
Whether it took three hours or three centuries, they were already dead. Johan Cross would see to that.
Great, said Page, with his head in his hands1. Look what you've done! I'm dead and you've turned the ruler of my city into a psychopath. You realise that he won't rest until the others are dead too?
I'm sorry.. said the weasel, unable to take his eyes off the staring, mutilated body on the floor. I'm so, so, sorry..
You're lucky he wasn't thinking clearly. He could quite easily have destroyed your soul. We can only pray he doesn't think of that when he manages to catch your companions.
Can we go now? asked the polecat. His corpse is making me feel ill.
A month after Page's death, I was back in SAIA again. Not to teach, as Fa'lina had hoped, but to learn things which I had not felt the need to study before.
I could sense that Fa'lina had misgivings about my return, but I did not know to what extent. I'm sure she noticed that my attitude was different - darker and more furtive than I was in happier times - the slightly wild look in my eyes, and the fact that I never smiled. I had kept my mind shielded for the whole of the interview and I never knew if it was that which made her suspicious, or if she had, by some deep magic unknown to me, silently broken through it and read from my mind the true reason why I had decided to return.
Either way, she allowed me to re-enrol and I immediately began to study hard, concentrating almost entirely on the theory and practical study of life sciences and metabiology. I don't think anyone noticed that I was focusing obsessively on Angel metabiology in particular, or if they did whether they realised why.
One night I entered the library with a fellow student, in hopes of recovering an extremely arcane and forbidden text which dealt with the summoning of creatures from the realm beyond. I told him that it was to help with our coursework, but really I was hoping that the secrets it contained would be the key to raising Azrael from the dead.
This was made more complicated by the fact that a number of Beings had somehow infiltrated the Academy and had engaged in a fight with the Librarian, foolishly summoning dire monsters in order to defend themselves and hampering our plan.
At length I managed to take a copy of the relevant parts of the tome, and set to work. The first stage was to cleanse my mind, which I did by embarking on the age-old ritual of sleep. This was not something I had needed to do for many many decades, but it was sometimes useful for problem solving and meditation.
I lay there, my mind concentrating on nothing but the black void, the null dreamspace which had come to replace the once-vivid dreams of my youth. Suddenly, I saw Azrael.
"Jakob," he said, "I know what you are seeking to do, but I beg of you not to proceed with it."
"But it will work!" I insisted. "All I need to do is amass sufficient energy, and I can bring you back!"
"Indeed. But have you stopped to work out how much energy you'll need to create a living body from scratch? Or from the decaying bones which you laid to rest? There's only one way you'll be able to do that, and that is by devouring the souls of dozens of other people. Maybe hundreds."
I looked at him, blinking back tears. "Is there no other way?"
"None. And if that is the alternative, I would rather stay dead.
That is all I can say to you right now, Jakob, but take heart. I shall be watching over you. After all, what are Angels for?" he grinned, and faded away from my dreams.
When he was gone, I awoke with my eyes still damp. Suddenly I sat up, clenching my fist around the bedclothes.
I had wavered from my original plan to try and make things right again, but this was now denied me. If I could not have Azrael back, I would put all my energies into vengeance. Those demons would wish they had never been born.
When I returned from SAIA, I found the palace brought back many painful memories. So I left it and the day-to-day running of the city to the mayor whom I had appointed to act in our absence, and moved the seat of governance to a new building in the mountains overlooking the city.
At its foundation was the generating station from the hydroelectric dam further up which powered Ha'Khun, but by the time my modifications had finished it was more like a fortress. The throne room was mostly kept dark and was lit from behind so that no-one could see me mourn. I kept it that way long after my grief had run its course, but by then it had taken far more sinister connotations.
I sat morosely upon upon this throne, listening to the reports my advisers brought for me.
"Well, Mi'lord, I fear there is still no news of the assassins, although we believe they may have fled to Macura Province."
"I see," I sighed. "And has there been any word from our ambassador there?"
"None as yet, Mi'lord."
"Very well. And what of our internal affairs?"
"The only real problem of note seems to be the problem of crime. There have been at least four slayings this week owing to the continuing gang war between Zarista Clan and the Fat Sun Brotherhood."
"Who is winning?" I asked, perking up for a moment.
"Zarista Clan, but by a small margin. Left unchecked this problem will continue to grow, I fear. Do you wish me to step up the raids, Mi'lord?"
"No.." I said, rubbing my muzzle. "No. I think I shall deal with this personally."
"What do you propose to do, your excellency?" he asked.
I smiled for the first time since Page had died, although it wasn't a very pretty smile. Soon it would become infamous. "I'm going to reason with them."
1 I didn't hear this exchange at the time of course, but in later years, to try and learn more of these demon assassins, I wove a spell that allowed me to look back into the time of Azrael's death. This came as something of a surprise.