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Date unavailable – Hell – The Sixth Circle of Inferno

Atop the towers that dotted the fortress of the Arch-Devil Kimaris, in the Sixth Circle of Inferno, the mad seers enslaved to the Arch-Devil's will looked at the burning skies of Hell with blinded eyes. Through the shift of the blazing heat, they felt the motion of the black stars, and babbled portents that were dutifully written down by infernal scribes on the flayed skin of heresiarchs, who had preached false doctrines and been damned for this sin for all eternity.

Now, those seers all spoke of the same thing, having perceived a great shift in the tapestry of Destiny and Fate over which the forces of Heaven and Hell forever battled as much as they did dominion of Earth. It took the Sorcerers of Kimaris many nights to understand the ramblings of the mad seers, and when they did, they chose the least of their number to bring the news to their lord, for they knew his wrath at the news would be great. And indeed, upon receiving the prophecy, the Arch-Devil cast the Sorcerer from his tower, sending it crashing down into the tainted earth, where it was beset by swarms of lesser fiends, forever eager for the slimmest chance to vent their hatred upon those who normally stood above them in Hell's merciless hierarchy.

The God-Tyrant YHWH had intervened directly into the matters of Earth, blessing a newborn child with great purpose. This was unacceptable to the Arch-Devil, yet at the same time a great opportunity, for to subvert God's Plan was the root of the Goetic magics on which his power was based, and the sacrifice or corruption of a future Saint of such import would see Kimaris' position vastly increased, perhaps to the point where he could ascend to a seat in the Court of the Seven-Headed Serpent.

Kimaris bade his Sorcerers to find where in the mortal realm the child dwelled, and though it took them several years to parse the unholy portents, they eventually delivered a location within one of the human nations that yet stood in opposition to the forces of Hell.

Kimaris was pleased, but the Arch-Devil couldn't leave Inferno to hunt for the child himself : the Covenant of Hell bound him as surely as all angels who had taken arms against the Creator during the First Rebellion. Even had that not been the case, leaving his domain unattended would see it seized by his rivals. Instead, he summoned one of his Praetors, known as the Princeling for the fact that it had been sired from Kimaris' own seed quickening in the belly of a female jackal.

As the Princeling knelt before his sire, Kimaris tasked him with hunting down the prophesied child, and either deliver it to the Heretics who did Hell's work on Earth, or kill it if the former was impossible. The Arch-Devil promised great rewards if his spawn succeeded, and greater torments should he fail – the curse of the Hell Knight, he warned, would be the least of the punishments the Princeling would suffer if he disappointed him.

The Princeling mustered his hunting party, drawing from the mightiest members of his sire's twenty demonic legions. First, he summoned one of the Sorcerers who had deduced the child's location, to act as a guide and ensure they found the correct target. A pair of Hell Knights were dragged from their tombs and forced into their suits of armor, and a gaggle of Yoke Fiends was collared into joining the hunt. To the Princeling's surprise, his warband was further reinforced by a Hunter of the Left-Hand Path, who was waiting outside the domain of the Arch-Devil despite no summon having been issued.

The hunting party emerged through the Hellmouth of the North, which fitfully opened where the lands of the Rus met the kingdoms of Europe, at the point where the mighty Fallen Azazel had come down to Earth during the First Rebellion. Sinister bargains were struck between Kimaris and Ziminiar, the Devil of the North and Watcher of the Hellmouth, to allow the warband passage. Aided by cults of mortals deceived into believing the devils were the old gods their ancestors worshipped, they slipped south through the territories of the Kalmar Union, avoiding the notice of the ever-present patrols until they reached the coast. There, a submarine of the Heretic Legions waited for them, its captain having received orders in the form of bleeding runes that had opened on his skin. Though half of the submarine's crew perished before the journey was complete to keep the agents of the Court entertained, the survivors did deliver the hunters across the sea and closer to their destination.

Guided by the Sorcerer and Hunter, they approached a small, insignificant village, its only feature of note the orphanage where the child they sought lived. Under the cover of night, the warband launched its attack, overwhelming the pitiful garrison in moments and beginning the slaughter of the God-Tyrant's slaves, while the Princeling and Sorcerer stalked toward the orphanage.

***

November 17th, 1907 – Holy Roman Empire

Inquisitor Hans Zettour could feel his horse dying under him as he pushed the steed far beyond the limits of her endurance. This was a poor repayment for the mare's years of good and loyal service, but as he saw the flames rising in the distance, all he could think of was that he might still be too late, might already have failed in his God-given duty.

The Synod of Strategic Prophecy had been clear, in a way all who worked with them knew was very rare, for mortal minds were not meant to see the world as God saw it, and the prophets paid a terrible price for their knowledge. They had felt the direct touch of the Lord, blessing the birth of a child : a champion, they had claimed, destined to lead the fight against the Legions of Hell and usher in a new age for the Faithful. But the direct intercession of the Almighty had been noticed by the Adversary, they had warned, and the promise of the child might yet be thwarted by the forces of Darkness, for they lived in a fallen Creation, where the weakness of Man had corrupted God's Grand Design.

After the horrors of the Year of the Broken Trinity thirteen years before, many who'd heard the Synod's prophecy had taken it as a sign that the Almighty hadn't forsaken His Faithful. Zettour had received the message straight from Rome, and immediately set out accompanied by his retinue, whose own mounts were struggling to keep pace. They were all armed, and had been expecting trouble even before the flames had become visible on the horizon.

Shouting orders for his followers to deal with the monsters, the Inquisitor made straight for the one building of the village which wasn't on fire, reasoning that it must be the orphanage where the demons' true target laid. The entire front wall was gone, ripped off by infernal muscle, and as he walked over the rubble, Zettour caught sight of many torn bodies – women and children, the caretakers and other residents of the orphanage no doubt. Then the stink of gore was overpowered by another, so foul it made him gag, but he forced himself to keep going, and soon saw its source : a huge hellspawn laying on the ground, reduced to a blackened carcass by a fire that had left the building around it untouched.

The moment his eyes took in the corpse, Zettour knew that it had been struck down by the Light of God. But he could still hear bestial noises from deeper inside the building and forced his reverence aside. Running toward the source of the sound, he found a scene that would remain with him until his dying day, for it seemed taken straight out of scripture and given form before him.

A towering fiend loomed over a small blond girl, its wings stretching out from its back like the Devil himself. From his studies, Zettour recognized the creature as a Praetor, one of Hell's champions in the Great War. From its three mouths came words that burned Zettour's ears, and the gaze of its three faces was the kind of nightmare that would break the resolve of paladins, yet the girl stared back defiantly, a grimace of disgust on her face.

Zettour raised his pistol and, with a prayer to the Lord for his aim to be true, fired.

The shot pierced through the fiend's skull, spilling its blasphemous brain matter across half the room. For a moment, it merely kept standing; then, with the inevitability of an avalanche, it fell. Shocked, Zettour stared at the weapon for a few seconds, unable to believe he'd gotten so lucky, before shaking himself out of his stupor. He might just have been the recipient of divine intervention, but he still had a duty to perform. Cautiously, the Inquisitor approached the child, who was staring at the corpse, her face rendered emotionless by shock.

"Hello," he said as softly as he could, and slowly, she turned to face him. "What's your name, child ?"

"I'm Tanya," she replied. This close, Zettour could see that her hands and arms were badly burned, and he winced internally at the thought of how much pain she must be in. Hopefully the burns weren't so deep that they'd caused nerve damage.

"Come with me, Tanya," the Inquisitor said, reaching a hand out to her. "I will take you somewhere safe."

She looked at him, her eyes, which seemed to glow with rapidly fading golden light, far too old for her youthful face.

"Nowhere is safe," she whispered, but she took Zettour's hand all the same, even as the Inquisitor's heart broke to hear such words from one so young.

***

May 21st, 1914 – Southern Kingdom of France

In the distance, Avignon was burning.

For centuries, the city and its surroundings had been a tumor in the heartlands of the Faithful, a stronghold from which the slaves of Beelzebub had launched numberless raids on the neighbouring French Duchies. Ever since the city's Cardinal had betrayed the Church and pledged his eternal soul to the Lord of Flies, claiming the title of Antipope in his hubris, the Cult of the Black Grail had been impossible to expunge from its refuge following its defeat at the hands of Europe's combined armies led by Jeanne d'Arc. Numerous attempts had been made, but all armies had succumbed to the pestilence that suffused the land itself long before catching sight of the cursed city's walls.

Which was all well and good, except that I would have preferred to have nothing to do with it. I had already been the target of far too many assassination attempts for my liking, and being linked to such a humiliation for one of Hell's mightiest Arch-Devils wasn't going to help.

It was my proposal that was being put into practice here. Artillery was hardly a new technology – centuries of endless warfare had forced Mankind to innovate, pushing military technology several decades ahead of what it had been at the start of World War One in my previous world – but I was the one who had come up with the theory behind the saturation bombardment being deployed here. At the time, I hadn't yet realized how desperate the Great War against Hell had made the people of this world, or how seriously they would take what anyone sane would have disregarded as an insane theory simply because I was the one who had come up with it.

To greatly simplify the method by which Avignon was meeting its long-awaited end, we were firing a deluge of artillery shells, using guns with an effective range of over a hundred kilometers, which had allowed us to set up on the outskirts of the Lord of Flies' beachhead in Europe. By concentrating fire, using a mix of high explosive and incendiaries, and adjusting the angle and timing of the barrage according to mathematical patterns which had been refined by some of the most gifted minds of the age, we had effectively created an artificial firestorm that was engulfing the entire city of Avignon, raising the temperature to a point where stone itself melted.

By itself, that probably wouldn't have been enough to cleanse the city : the servants of the Black Grail were infamous for their resilience. But each shell had been especially prepared for the task. The metal casings had been engraved with sacred prayers and anointed with blessed oils, while the payloads within included silver and other components which had demonstrated their efficiency against infernal creatures.

The part of me that dealt in logistics wept to see so much capital go up in smoke with every shot, but the war against Hell was one of survival. I might privately disagree with the Church's obsession with martyrdom and dubious experiments, but there was no denying that Hell was worse, damning as such faint praise might be.

Once the firestorm died down, we would have to ride into the ruins and search for any survivors to dispatch. I really, really hoped the so-called Antipope wouldn't be among them. Everyone would expect me to face him in person if he was, and win or lose, this would only bring me more trouble.

Standing atop a hill, watching the devastation unfold, I was aware that the rest of the host likely thought I was praying for our victory. I prayed often in my current life, of course : to do otherwise when I was surrounded by the Church, my every move scrutinized, would have been stupid. But while I mouthed the words and gave all the appearance of sincerity I could fake (which was apparently enough to fool the Inquisition, which, given its responsibilities, I wasn't sure how to feel about), in my heart of hearts, I still despised Being X for reincarnating me here.

As far as everyone else knew, I was a genius child, chosen by God from birth to help fight the hordes of Hell, who had struck down a Sorcerer with the purity of my faith as a seven-years old. The truth was somewhat different : when I had faced the minions of Hell for the first time, and realized that the stories the orphanage's nuns were telling us about the Great War were true and not dehumanizing propaganda targeting a rival ethno-state, Being X had forcefully intervened through me in order to smite the floating, four-armed, goat-faced monstrosity. Then, as the Praetor accompanying the Sorcerer had loomed over me, he had commanded me to pray to him for salvation, and I had refused - more due to the shock from the pain of my burned arms than anything else, I must admit.

I had only survived through Inquisitor Zettour's intervention, which I suspected had been guided by Being X so that he could keep trying to break my will. I didn't begrudge Zettour his faith, nor the people of this world theirs : faced with the horrors of Hell, that they still held on after nearly eight hundred years was a testament to the strength of their resolve, and they deserved any comfort they could get. And Zettour had been a lot kinder with me than he probably was used to, given the duties of an Inquisitor.

I sighed as I remembered the fear and confusion of those first few months in the custody of the Church, although at least their healers had helped save my arms, to the point I only had light scarring nowadays, even if most people seemed to regard it as stigmata for some inane reason. Next to me, the immense mountain of muscle which served as my bodyguard grunted something only our long association let me understand was a question.

"I am fine, Max," I reassured the Communicant. Swollen with the dubious blessings that came from partaking of the flesh of a Meta-Christ (and what did that say about the Church, that cloning the Redeemer was not just something they would do, but do multiple times ?), he had been at my side for two years now, and saved my life more times than I cared to remember. During our journey to Avignon alone, he had stopped three assassination attempts. According to intelligence reports gathered by the Paladins during their sojourns into Hell itself, Kimaris had never gotten over me escaping the hunting party he had sent after me, and the Arch-Devil was possibly even more stubborn than me when it came to holding grudges.

I was the one who had given my bodyguard his (admittedly not very original and rather on-the-nose) name. Apparently, Communicants abandoned theirs when they underwent the transformation. They were also often considered mindless brutes by their handlers, but I knew better. Yes, Max would never win any theological debate that didn't involve bashing a heretic's skull with his cross-shaped hammer, but I was convinced he understood far more of the world around him than most people would suspect. And his loyalty and devotion were unquestioned, which made him the only person on this world I truly, completely trusted.

"Colonel Lergen," I said, turning toward the officer in charge of the military complement of this expedition as he approached, keeping a respecting distance from me (and Max, whose reaction to people getting close to me without permission was far from gentle at the best of time, which this wasn't). "Any change from the Black Grail's cultists ?"

"None, Your Holiness," the Germanic man replied. I didn't enjoy the near-worship in his tone, but sadly, by that point I was used to it. I hadn't been officially recognized as a Living Saint by the Church, but I knew it was only a matter of time, especially after this. "The wretches are still attacking us, but they lack any form of organisation, and our lines are holding. They won't get close to the guns, I swear to you."

"Good," I nodded approvingly.

Ever since we had entered the tainted land, our forces had been subjected to hit-and-run attacks by warbands of the Black Grail, but it was only when the guns had started firing that Beelzebub's minions had grown frantic, even desperate. If they had taken the time to muster for an attack in great numbers, they might have been able to punch through our lines, but the leadership of the Order of the Fly was as fractious as any part of Hell's horde. With their most important members in Avignon itself, the Black Grail forces lacked a clear leader, leaving individual warbands to throw themselves on the soldiers' bayonets in a desperate attempt to silence our artillery.

Purging the rest of the fallen Duchy would be long, hard work, but the destruction of Avignon itself was a powerful symbol. Even from here, I could hear the sound of cheering over the thunderous noise of the guns : the sight of the damned city burning was doing wonders for morale.

Returning my gaze to Colonel Lergen, I forced myself to smile. "Is there anything else, Colonel ?"

"No, Your Holiness. I just wanted to thank you, for letting us be part of this."

"Take heart, Colonel," I said. "Our work has only just begun."

I would survive this miserable world, I silently swore as the Colonel saluted and went back down the hill, where a gaggle of aides were waiting, having watched our discussion with barely disguised curiosity and envy. No matter what Being X, Kimaris, or anyone else threw my way, I would meet my second death in my bed, of old age, after living as long and happy a life as could be found in this war-torn hellscape.

And if that meant helping thwart the forces of Inferno, well, I didn't have any objection to kicking the Devil's backside.