The Barbed Plains.

Dis was the only habitable region of Damnation. Beyond it's great iron walls were endless miles of cold, empty cavern, its floor covered in a mess of coarse barbed wire. It sprouted from the very ground like creeping vines, groaning as it grew. It took teams of Devils hundreds of hours to prune the barbs so they didn't grow beyond knee-height, whereupon the excess wire would be carted back to Dis and melted down in the foundries. There wasn't much metal to be gleaned this way, but it was the only resource they had that couldn't be grown or recycled.

Of course, that wasn't the Barbed Plains' main purpose, oh no. With every passing second, bright wormholes of golden light would open up near the ceiling, dropping dozens of translucent figures down into the wire down below. They screamed and pleaded in fear and confusion as they plummeted, their howls only intensifying as they got tangled up in the sharp iron barbs.

Lucifer stood amidst the wire fields, narrowing his eyes as he watched the souls of mortals trap themselves with every panicked spasm. Time was they were hand delivered with ceremony and fanfare. But those days were long gone; nowadays souls were just dumped here like common trash.

As he observed the screaming mortals, a team of Devils marched towards them, each wearing thick protective gear and carrying vicious looking instruments; catchpoles, lassos and nets most prominently. Behind them they dragged a cage cart, already stuffed with wailing souls.

Lucifer's frown deepened. They were getting pushed to capacity. Work on new penitence chambers couldn't be rushed any faster.

"My lord?" piped a voice from beside him.

The King of Demons glanced over at his loyal butler, Fero. He was standing dutifully to attention, though he looked rather uncomfortable given the iron barbs snagging his trousers.

"Not now," Lucifer sighed.

"But-"

"Not. Now."

He waved his hand silently. He was beyond the need for incantations; it may be a prison of sorts, but Damnation was still his domain. The barbed wire parted to form a path, allowing Lucifer to march towards the newest batch of mortal souls. The Devil work team respectfully bowed as he passed, allowing him to walk unimpeded towards one soul in particular.

A young man, slightly translucent and garbed in an ethereal grey robe, just like all the others. It was difficult for a layman to tell without the halo and wings, but the bronze skin and silver hair was a dead giveaway. The faded grey marks upon his skin, too.

"Angel. Cease your struggling," Lucifer barked, clasping his hands behind his back.

The recently-deceased angel looked at him with wide, panicked eyes. They were golden.

"Wh- What?! Am I-?"

"Dead, yes. Tell me, how fares Heaven?"

"Where am I? Wh- Who are you?!"

Lucifer narrowed his eyes.

"You don't recognise me...?"

"No!"

"... Tell me your name."

"A- Alfri baFelai! Miller Caste! Please, sir! I did nothing wrong!" the angel cried.

So Heaven was still an overclocked machine of stacked castes and mindless drones. They got to forge ahead into a new future; afforded the luxury of forgetting the horrors they wrought upon Hell... the crimes committed during the Rapture...!

"I- I remember the millstone jamming, a- and the Authority on overwatch told me to climb in and fix the fault, because if we didn't get the line moving again he'd-!"

Lucifer abruptly grabbed the angel by the throat, cutting his panicked throes off as he lifted the dead soul into the air. He choked and gasped for air, despite no longer needing it.

"What manner of angel are you?" the King of Demons asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Ack-! N- Nuntius, sir! I'm a Nuntius...!"

An angel of Humility. Countermeasures to combat Nymphs.

"Well, Alfri the Nuntius, allow me to remind you of the facts that your 'benevolent' lord has kept from you. I am Lucifer, Overseer of Hell and lord of Creation. I created demons, and your master created you to combat them. Do you understand what I'm saying? You owe your entire existence to me," Lucifer hissed, narrowing his eyes.

Alfri looked around with a bewildered look his eyes, ethereal tears streaking down his face.

"Wh- What?! But demons are just myths!"

Lucifer bared his teeth, infuriated by the sheer disrespect. Turning to the Devil work team, he tightened his grip on the angel's throat.

"I will deal with this one personally. All of you; back to work!"

The quickly set about capturing the other lost souls, bowing to their lord as he began to forge a path back across the Barbed Plains, towards the looming shadow of Dis in the distance. Fero followed close behind, taking care not to snag his clothes.

"My lord? Is now a good time?" he asked, quickly scuttling along to match his master's lengthy stride.

The King of Demons rolled his eyes, deaf to the angel's pleading screams as he dragged him along behind him.

"Make it quick."

"Right you are. The Alpha Corps have gone dark. Every one of them."

Lucifer stopped in his tracks. He tightened his grip on Alfri's throat, causing the mortal soul to whimper.

"... Excuse me?"

"They haven't reported in, and they've all gone dark, one by one. Our last correspondence with Gamma was weeks ago."

He had gotten used to Delta often running off for weeks or even months without contact, but the other two were much more disciplined than that. Beta was the most loyal Devil in all of Damnation, and Gamma's perfectionist streak forced her to carry out every mission to the letter.

Swearing beneath his breath, he forged on.

"Well? Don't just stand there, start explaining what the fuck happened!"

Fero cleared his throat and began leafing through a bundle of crumpled documents in his arms.

"Right away. Gamma has provided a full report on the Incubus that killed Diate. She managed to secure a picture of him."

He jogged alongside his master and handed him a newspaper clipping. It depicted a candid photo of an Incubus man, though perhaps boy was a better term. He was a second stage demon, dressed in a shirt and tie with a tired look in his eyes. Most striking of all, however, was his horns; they were both dark grey in colour and metallic in composition.

The horns of a Devil.

"His name is Cobalt Trayer. The locals refer to him as the Iron Hound. We believe he is some kind of folk hero, pledged to defend the town of-"

Fero briefly glanced through a notebook.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"- Brimstone against further attacks. We strongly suspect he wiped out the Alpha Corps," he concluded as they approached the gates of Dis.

Lucifer frowned.

"He's a kid."

"Not so, my lord. Apparently he is of full grown age. He has Everlast Syndrome."

Everlast? That's what they were calling it? That glitch in the maturation system that cropped up whenever Lucifer first struggled to meld his demons' natural magical growth with their physical age? He managed to hammer the worst of it out, but it still cropped up here and there, and seeing as it only occurred in one of every couple of million demons, he relented in allowing the problem to persist.

But an Incubus with Everlast Syndrome? He hadn't even considered the possibility of such a thing ever happening.

The pair entered into the main street of Dis. Lucifer kept his head down, doing his best to ignore the obvious strife and turmoil of his people he marched towards the entrance to the processing station, still dragging the angel along behind him.

"What about the horns?" he asked.

Fero cleared his throat nervously.

"We, um... We suspect that Trayer entered a contract with the young lady, sir."

Lucifer's heart nearly stopped dead in his chest.

No. This couldn't be. He had hoped that deep down, in his heart of hearts, that this little escapade was nothing more than his daughter's attempt at striking out for independence, and that when faced with her old comrades-in-arms she would return willingly with the prototype. But no... that picture of the Incubus was all he needed.

She had aligned herself with a Devil killer. She had sided with the Iron Hound.

"... I'm going to have to kill her, aren't I...?" Lucifer breathed softly, arriving in front of the processing plant.

Fero just looked away, unwilling to answer the question.

Stepping up to the great steel doors of the massive smoke-spewing foundry, Lucifer slammed his fist against a button on the wall, causing a klaxon to sound as the doors gradually screeched open. Devil workers bustled to and fro, herding mortal souls off the carts and into cramped elevators, where they would be ferried down to their penitence far below.

"Wh- Where are you taking me...?!" Alfri choked, struggling to loosen the King of Demons' grip.

The Devil regarded him with a cold gaze.

"A place where you get to play your part in the great Chain."

The doors opened fully, allowing the three to step into a dingy lift. At his master's command, Fero struck a button on a nearby control panel, kicking the elevator into high gear as it began to rapidly lower through a darkened stone shaft. After a few moments of vertigo-inducing descent, the walls fell away to reveal a vast subterranean chamber, filled to the brim with hundreds upon thousands of grey steel gantries. Mounted upon each were dozens of restraining devices, and locked within each device was a single, tortured soul. Their screams filled the air as they struggled against their shackles, but the Devils patrolling the gangways made sure they didn't scream for too long.

"Th- This is Hell...!" Alfri gasped, falling still for the first time since he arrived.

Lucifer snorted humorlessly.

"No. This is Damnation," he spat, nodding for Fero to stop the lift.

Arriving at a recently-constructed gantry, he dragged the angel's soul along the gangway, past dozens of other mortal souls. They were each thrashing in their restraints, faces frozen in terror. Lattice-like devices were placed upon their heads, with two prominent spikes piercing directly into their skulls.

"What do you know of life and death, Alfri the Nuntius?" the King of Demons asked dryly, stopping before an empty slot in the vast infernal machine.

"Wh- What?"

"It's a vast, complex Chain. One that stretches on for centuries. But not infinitely. String him up."

A pair of Devil workers grabbed the angel and began affixing him to the device, locking his limbs in place despite his wailing and struggling.

"But that's over your head. No, I'll be kind enough to tell you about the first stage of a mortal's death, and what to expect from a place like this," Lucifer continued, leaning against the gantry railing.

"What are you talking about?!" Alfri screamed as he was fitted with a wired headpiece.

Lucifer smiled, but he felt no joy from it.

"A mortal dies. Their soul is cast into Damnation. If left alone, that soul will rot, and you're left with a useless, gibbering aberration. No, before anything else, the soul will require cleaning. And to cleanse sin, the soul will need to experience a Hell of a lot of pain."

He nodded to one of the workers, who threw a lever. The hiss of hermetic seals sounded as a pair of spikes was driven right into Alfri's ethereal temples, cutting off his shocked cries.

"This will hurt, of course. And it will last many, many years. But no-one stays in Damnation forever; as much as I would love to attend to my many guests for eternity, I am still a slave to the Chain. Once you are clean, you can move along to Eden for the next step in the process."

He laid his hand on a dial mounted to a nearby control panel.

"... of course, what the Archangels will do to you will hurt so, so much more."

Lucifer sharply twisted the dial. A high-pitched whine rang out from the machine as Alfri began to scream, his eyes glazing over as he was presented with a nightmarish Hellscape of his own mind's making.

He thought he'd get satisfaction from this. But no, there was nothing. Just weariness, like this was another day at the office.

"Let's go, Fero," Lucifer sighed, returning to the lift.

"Are... you alright, my lord?"

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"You seem... not well."

He glanced at the elevator's controls. For a moment his finger lingered over the ground floor button, before his face darkened and the King of Demons abruptly hit the button for the lowest floor in the vast demonic complex.

"We all have our places either upon or outside of the Chain, Fero, and mine doesn't account for my wellbeing."

"But-"

"How about you focus on the matters at hand, hm? My errant hellion being the most prominent one."

His butler nodded curtly and stared straight ahead as the lift continued to drop. The silence persisted as the minutes ticked by, even as the elevator was cast into darkness and a cold, daunting pressure weighed down upon them both. By the time they reached the very bottommost floor of the processing plant, the mortal screams had faded away, replaced by a distant industrial hum.

The doors opened to reveal a single stone corridor lit by dim lamps. A pair of Devil guards flanked the elevator door, and they bowed as their lord passed. Further down the hall, he stopped outside of a guard station.

"You," he barked to a Devil behind the desk, "his belongings. Now."

"R- Right away, my lord!"

The guard quickly ducked into a back room.

"If you don't mind my saying-"

"I think I do, Fero."

"But have you thought this through? Didn't you say that you'd let him rot for-?"

"I do not employ you to nag me! Remember your fucking place!"

The guard returned with an old, beaten crate. Cracking the lid open, Lucifer reached inside and pulled out a long, rusted butcher's cleaver, weathered and nicked from countless years of use and abuse. Fero went pale at the sight of it.

"He'll kill her, my lord," he breathed.

Lucifer shut his eyes as he slammed the crate shut, uninterested in the rest of its contents.

"... I know."

With his heart weighing heavier than he thought possible, the King of Demons marched down to the end of the hall, where a massive metal door loomed. It was a masterwork of Devil engineering; a mighty bulwark capable of withstanding constant, uninterrupted assault for years without bearing even a scratch. They were once used in Pandemonium to protect treasure vaults, personal armouries and loved one's mementos.

But here in Dis, it was used to keep one specific prisoner on lockdown.

Lucifer turned to the Devils flanking the great door.

"Open it," he commanded.

They looked at each other.

"My lord, you told us to never-"

"OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!"

Flinching, they hastily bowed and rushed over to the door's locks. Producing a pair of keys, they turned them, kicking the door's internal mechanisms into gear. It hissed, squeaked, grinded, groaned and clanged, ticking and clicking as each of it's countless magnets disengaged and it's dozens of pistons retracted. The minutes dragged on, and by the time the door was finally unlocked, almost seven had passed. Looking at each other once more with terrified eyes, the guards braced their hands against the door and pushed it open.

Beyond was a massive, pitch-black chamber. Lucifer wordlessly stepped inside, barely reacting as a fetid smell struck his nostrils.

He took a deep breath.

"Epsilon," he called into the echoing shadows.

From deep within, a pair of bloody eyes opened.

"Alpha?" growled a deep, guttural voice, roughened by years of maddened roaring.

"I have need of you," Lucifer stated.

He heard Epsilon shuffle about from within the prison chamber, causing the sound of clinking chains to echo off the smooth stone walls.

"Is that so?"

"Perform one duty for me, and I will be willing to end your sentence."

A coarse, hollow laugh echoed from within.

"I thought there was no reprieve from a crime as great as mine. Was that not what you told me, Alpha?" Epsilon guffawed.

Lucifer narrowed his eyes.

"You murdered countless of your fellow Devils, damning them to the unknown. But even so-"

"They were doomed anyway. I offered them mercy; better than rotting down here, trapped like rats."

"How dare you speak over me!" the King of Demons roared, his voice booming throughout the prison.

Epsilon just laughed again.

"Why, what are you gonna do, Alpha? Put me in double prison? Or are you gonna put me out of my misery?"

His breath caught in his throat. A horribly unfamiliar sensation.

"Oh yeah, I forgot. The one line you won't cross. You're still scared of what you don't know."

The imprisoned Devil snorted.

"But sure, I'm open to doing your dirty work. Unlike some, I relish the opportunity to help others explore what lies beyond the Chain," he said.

Gritting his teeth, Lucifer produced the butcher knife and tossed it into the darkness. He then held out the newspaper clipping of Cobalt Trayer.

"There is a town called Brimstone in Aporue, built upon the site of Bastion 31-3. In that town is an Incubus named Cobalt Trayer. He has formed a contract with Omega. She... is irrecoverable. Find them. Kill them. Return with whatever they have on them," he instructed in a commanding tone.

But despite his best efforts, Lucifer couldn't keep his voice from wavering when he mentioned the prospect of his own child's death, something Epsilon immediately picked up on.

"... So you'd consign her to oblivion. You know there's no coming back from that, Alpha."

"I know."

"Even if she does, she won't be the same."

"I know!"

"And after all we've been through - all you've been through - you'd still command her death?"

Lucifer swallowed hard.

"... Yes," he whispered, his eyes squeezed shut and his fists balled tightly.

Epsilon went silent for a moment, his eyes disappearing as he thought long and hard.

"Hm... An Incubus, a Devil and a forbidden pact made between the two..."

They reappeared, along with a glinting maw filled with rotten, pointed teeth.

"... Consider it done, my Alpha."