P.S this story starts a few years before the start of our favorite DXD verse!
AND I DON'T OWN ANY DXD MATERIAL, ALL CREDIT TO THE ORIGINAL WRITERS!
"Talking out aloud"
'Thinking with ones mind'
"Spirits inside the sacred gears talking"
Without further delay, lets start the chapter!
Adara?" Apollon breathed. "That voice. I would know that voice among ten thousand. It cannot be." He rose fully to his feet now, and the light that clung to him flared brighter, agitated. "You died. I know you died. I mourned you, I raged over you, the whole of Olympus felt the wound of it. And now I feel you, here, alive, bound into a trinket on the hand of a—" His gaze snapped to Kenta, and abruptly the golden warmth of the sun-god curdled into something scorching. "A Devil."
The temperature in the hall climbed sharply. Behind Kenta, Yumi flinched; the light spilling from Apollon had gone from warm to punishing, the radiance of a star deciding whether to be angry.
"What have they done to you?" the god demanded, and there was genuine, ancient anguish beneath the fury. "Were you forced into this? Chained to their service? Speak, Adara, and if these creatures have bound you against your will, I swear upon the Styx I will burn their delegation to ash where they sit, peace be damned—"
"Apollon."
The single word, spoken gently, stopped the god cold.
"Peace, old friend. Peace." The flame within the ring pulsed, soft and steady, and the warmth in Adara's voice was the warmth of someone soothing a creature they had known and loved for a very long time. "No one has forced me to anything. Lower your light before you frighten the poor boy out of his skin; Kenta has never done a cruel thing in his life, and he is quite attached to that skin." A note of dry humor. "I am not a prisoner. I am not a slave. I am exactly where I have chosen to be, and I will thank you not to incinerate my host, whom I am rather fond of."
Apollon stared at the ring, the fury warring visibly with confusion and a dawning, desperate hope. Slowly, by degrees, the killing radiance receded, though he did not sit back down.
"…Explain," he said hoarsely. "Please. Adara. The last I knew of you, you were dead, and now I find you living, and bound, and defending the very creatures I would have expected to hold you captive. Nothing of this makes sense. Explain it to me."
The other gods had gone very quiet. Zeus watched with narrowed, thunderous interest. Athena's grey eyes moved between the god and the ring, cataloguing. And in the ring, the fire-spirit called Adara let out a long, warm sigh, and began, at last, to tell the story that even her own host had never heard in full.
"Very well. For your sake, and because these good Devils deserve to have the truth of me spoken plainly before you, I will tell it. All of it."
"I was born of a union that should never have been," Adara began, and her voice took on the cadence of old, sad legend. "A fire-serpent, brought into the world out of wedlock, from the copulation of the gorgon Medusa and a Greek hero whose name I will not speak, for he never once deserved to have it spoken beside mine. I was a thing that should not have existed, by the reckoning of the world, and the world treated me as such. I was abandoned at my birth. Left to die, a squalling coal of a creature with no mother willing to claim her and no father willing to admit to her."
The flame dimmed, remembering.
"And I would have died, but for one soul who looked upon an abandoned monster and saw, instead, something worth saving." The warmth flared, gentle and grateful, and turned itself toward the golden god. "You, Apollon. It was you who found me. You who took pity on a creature the whole world had thrown away. You raised me, in your fashion, and you shaped me, and everything good that I became I became because of what you poured into me. Life. Balance. Protection. Healing. Harmony." A soft, crackling laugh. "And fire, of course. Always fire. I was your creature in every way that mattered, old friend, and I have never once forgotten it."
Apollon's expression had crumpled into something raw and wounded and tender. "I remember," he said quietly. "I remember every day of it. Go on."
"You know how the story turns, then, for you lived the grief of it." The fire hardened, and Adara's voice cooled to something colder, older, edged with an ancient anger that had never fully died. "I grew. I came into my strength, and my strength was considerable, and it drew the eyes of those who measure themselves by the monsters they can slay. One such was a scion of the line of Hercules. Not the man who stands at your shoulder this very day, King Zeus, let me be clear on that," the ring's light flicked, briefly, toward the rigid figure of the present Heracles, "but one of his forebears. An ancestor of your vanguard, born generations before the Heracles who sits with us now, and cut from the very same proud and prickly cloth."
Every eye in the hall turned, as one, to the vanguard standing at Zeus's shoulder.
Heracles had gone rigid. His jaw was clenched, his massive hands curled into fists at his sides, and he stared fixedly at a point on the far wall, refusing to meet a single gaze.
"He challenged me," Adara continued, and there was grim satisfaction in it now. "A hero of proud blood, come to add a fire-serpent's head to his legend. And I beat him. Soundly. Thoroughly. I broke his pride along with a good number of his bones and I sent him limping away with nothing to show for his boldness but shame." The flame flickered, and the satisfaction drained away into disgust. "But a bruised ego is a dangerous thing in a proud man, and this one could not abide the humiliation. So he did what small men do. He lied. He went to the great hero Siegfried, the original, the Norseman, the dragon-slayer of that age, and he spun him a tale. He told Siegfried that I was a monster, a fire-serpent terrorizing a village of Amazon warriors, a beast to be put down for the good of the innocent. And Siegfried, who was a true hero and believed himself to be doing right, came to slay the wicked dragon he had been told of."
Silence gripped the chamber.
"They came for me together, in the end. Siegfried, and the son of Hercules's line who had already tasted defeat at my hands. And it was a terrible battle, the kind the skalds still half-remember without knowing why." The fire guttered low. "When it was over, all three of us lay dead upon that field. Siegfried, deceived to the last. The scion of Hercules's line, who at least had the decency to die achieving the murder he had schemed for. And I. All three, slain. My revenge, such as it was, was to take both of them into death with me."
Adara's voice dropped, and for a moment the ancient rage gave way to something almost like weariness.
"And when Odin, the All-Father of the Norse, learned the truth of how his champion Siegfried had been deceived and spent, manipulated into a murder by a lying Greek princeling, he was livid. That single act soured the friendship between Olympus and Asgard for centuries. Wars of words, closed borders, insults that festered into generations of mistrust, all of it flowing from one proud man's inability to accept an honest defeat." The flame turned, pointedly, toward the silent, rigid figure of Heracles. "So you will understand, Lord Heracles, why I am not overfond of certain bloodlines. And why I find it interesting that a son of your house should be the one at this table crying loudest for war."
Heracles said nothing. But a muscle worked in his jaw, and he could not meet the ring's light.
"Then how," Apollon pressed, his voice thick, "do you come to be here? Bound into a Sacred Gear, in the keeping of a Devil? If you died on that field, Adara, how is it that you speak to me now?"
"The Sacred Gear system," Adara said simply. "When I fell, my soul did not scatter as most do. It was… gathered. Preserved. Bound into one of the God of the Bible's creations, a Sacred Gear, to slumber and to serve whatever host it should one day find. That is how I persisted. That is how a dead fire-serpent came to open her eyes again inside a piece of holy machinery, centuries after her body was ash."
"And your host," Apollon said, his gaze sliding, warily, to Kenta. "This… Devil. What did you intend by him?"
The ring was quiet for a moment.
"Revenge," Adara admitted, and there was no shame in it, only honesty. "At first. And for a very long time after. I will not lie to you, old friend, for you have always known when I do. When I first woke within this Gear and understood what I was, and what I had become, I thought of nothing but the two who had ended me, and the bloodline that had schemed my death. And I carried that hunger with me through host after host, down all the long years, from one wielder to the next. Every new soul the Gear passed to, I looked upon as a fresh blade to be honed toward the same old purpose, a vessel to grow strong through and to bend to my vengeance. Many came and went, Apollon, and through every last one of them, my bloodlust never once cooled." The flame flickered, and then, slowly, softened. "Until him. Until this one. That dream of vengeance died at last, quietly, and without my quite noticing when, and it died because of the vessel fate finally handed me."
The light turned, warm and fond, toward Kenta, who had gone very still and very red.
"A great, gentle, ridiculous lion of a boy who would sooner starve than see another creature go hungry. Who took a homeless, grudge-ridden fire-spirit into his soul and treated her, from the very first day, not as a weapon to be wielded but as a friend to be cherished. In all my hosts across all those long years, not one had ever done such a thing. I came to him wanting a sword, Apollon, as I had wanted from every host before him, and instead, for the first time, I found a home. It has been only a short while that I have known him, mere weeks, and yet in that little span I discovered that I no longer wished to spend my second life chasing the ghosts of two dead men. I found new goals. Better ones. A future worth wanting, in place of a past worth avenging." A soft, crackling laugh. "So no. I am not forced. I am not chained. I stay because I choose to stay, beside a boy I would follow into any fire, and I would thank the world to let an old serpent finally rest her grudges."
Heracles' mouth opened, as though he would say something, some protest or defense or accusation, and then, catching the weight of every gaze in the room, he shut it again and remained silent. Whatever had been on his tongue, he swallowed it.
Apollon, for his part, looked as though a great and terrible weight had been lifted from him. He sank slowly back into his seat, his eyes never leaving the ring, and something that was half a laugh and half a sob escaped him.
"You always did have a talent for surviving what should have killed you," he murmured. "Even death. Even twice." He shook his golden head. "I am glad, Adara. I am glad beyond words. To have grieved you, and to find you living and content, is more than I dared ever hope for." Then a thought seemed to strike him, and his brow furrowed. "But there is one thing more I would understand. The God of the Bible bound you into His Gear. Why? Of all the souls in all the world, why gather up a Greek fire-serpent, a creature of my making, and set her to slumber in a holy weapon? What did He want with you?"
The ring was thoughtful for a long moment.
"I have wondered that myself, for a very long time," Adara said slowly. "And the only answer I ever found that made sense was… you, Apollon. My connection to you." She let that settle. "Think on it. I am your creature, shaped by your hand, beloved of a god of Olympus. If the God of the Bible foresaw a day when He might need the friendship of the Greek pantheon, in the Great War against the Fallen and the Devils, perhaps, when Heaven's back was against the wall, then what better bridge to Olympus than a Sacred Gear housing a soul that you loved? A living reminder of a debt, a bond He might one day call upon. I always believed He preserved me not for my power, but for my ties. As a key, kept in a drawer, against the day a certain door might need opening."
Apollon's frown deepened. "And yet He never came to me. In all the long years of the Great War, the God of the Bible never once approached Olympus for aid, never invoked any bond, never spoke your name to me or asked a single favor on the strength of it."
"No," Adara agreed quietly. "He did not. And so I am left with only two possibilities, old friend. Either I was wrong about His reasons from the very start, and He gathered me up for some purpose I have never guessed…" the flame flickered, "…or I was right, and He was simply saving me for a later hour that, for whatever reason, never came. A key set aside for a door He meant to open another day, and then, it seems, never did."
A slow, thoughtful silence fell across the assembled gods. And then, one by one, they nodded, grave and understanding, for there was wisdom in the fire-serpent's reasoning, and each of them had lived long enough to know that the God of the Bible had always played a longer game than anyone around him could see.
"A key for a door that was never opened," Athena murmured, turning the thought over. "How very like Him. He never did do anything without three reasons, at least two of which He kept locked away where no one else could ever reach them." She inclined her head, fractionally, toward the ring. "Your account rings true, fire-serpent. And it speaks, I think, rather well of your host, and of the Devils who kept faith with you when they might have used you as a tool." Her grey eyes moved to Marid, sharp and reassessing. "Curious. A Devil delegation with an abandoned monster in its ranks, who stays not from compulsion but from love. That is not the shape of a people spoiling for a war. It is the shape of a people who have learned, perhaps, to take in the things the rest of the world throws away." She was quiet a moment. "It is a point in your favor, young Gremory. I will weigh it."
Marid inclined his head, and wisely said nothing at all, for he understood that Adara had, in a handful of honest words, done more to warm the gods toward the Devil cause than an hour of his own careful arguments ever could.
The negotiations, warmed considerably by the fire-serpent's unexpected testimony, wound gradually toward their close. The hard edges had gone out of the discussion; where two hours ago the gods had watched the Devils with the cold calculation of predators sizing up a meal, now there was something closer to the wary give-and-take of powers who had decided, provisionally, that they might be able to do business after all.
It was Poseidon who at last stirred from his long, tidal silence, his sea-green eyes moving across the Devil delegation with slow deliberation.
"We draw toward an accord," the Lord of the Sea rumbled, his voice the low roll of surf on shingle. "That much is plain to any soul in this hall with the wit to feel it. Before we set our hands to the shape of it, then, let me ask the plain question a host should ask. Is there anything further that must be spoken? Any matter left in the shadows, any card yet unturned?" His gaze settled, not unkindly, on Marid and Serafall. "Speak now, Devils, if there is more. I would rather hear a hard thing across the table than discover it after the ink has dried."
For the first time all evening, Marid hesitated.
It was a small thing, a fractional pause, but every god in that hall had spent millennia reading the tells of mortals and immortals alike, and they caught it at once. Even Serafall glanced sideways at him, and there was a flicker of genuine surprise on the Maou's face; whatever was coming, it was plainly not something her fellow delegate had cleared with her beforehand. Marid's plans, as ever, ran on tracks that only he could fully see.
"…There is one more thing," Marid admitted, and he rose slowly from his seat. "Though it is not a demand, nor a term, nor a concession I mean to wring from you. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is something I wish to return." He drew a breath. "For it belongs, by every right I can reckon, to the gods of Olympus. And more particularly, Lord Poseidon, to you."
That caught the attention of every being at the table. Zeus leaned forward. Athena's eyes narrowed. And Poseidon went very still, the surf-murmur that clung to him falling, for a moment, to silence.
Marid raised one hand, and a demonic magic circle bloomed to life above his open palm.
It was an intricate thing, the crimson sigil of the Gremory turning slowly in the air, its light steady and sure. And as it spun, it did not summon or destroy, as such circles so often did. Instead it simply opened, unfolding a narrow seam into somewhere else, a private dimension, a pocket of space that Marid kept tucked away in the world's margins as easily as another man might carry a coin purse. From within that opened fold, drawn forth on the light of his own magic, he brought out a single object, and laid it upon the ancient stone of the table with a reverence that bordered on ceremony.
It was a trident.
It was broken. That was the first thing anyone saw. One of its three tines had been snapped clean away, and the haft was cracked down much of its length, and the whole of it bore the deep, patient scars of unimaginable age and violence. And yet, broken as it was, ruined as it was, the thing shimmered. Power clung to it, faded and banked but unmistakable, the way embers glow in the ash of a fire that was once an inferno. Even diminished, even shattered, it hummed with a resonance that made the very sea beyond the terrace seem to lean in, listening.
Poseidon rose from his seat as though pulled by a string.
He said nothing for a long moment. He simply stared at the broken weapon upon the table, and though he had never in all his endless existence laid eyes upon it before, some deep and ancient part of him, the part that was the ocean itself, knew it. Knew that this was no common relic dressed up in glamour. Knew that it was bound, root and marrow, to the oldest currents of Greek myth.
"…Where," Poseidon said, and his voice had gone quiet and strange, "did you find this, Devil?"
"I will tell you the whole of it," Marid said. "But first, let me tell you what it is, for I suspect you already half-know." He looked at the trident, and then at the god. "This is the trident of King Atlas. Not the Titan who bears the sky, my lord, but the mortal. The legendary king of the lost city of Atlantis, greatest and most terrible of the drowned kings, and, if the oldest genealogies I have unearthed are to be believed, a far-descended son of your own divine blood, Lord Poseidon. Your line, run down through mortal generations, to the throne of a city that sank beneath the waves."
A sound went through the assembled gods, low and astonished.
"Atlantis," Poseidon breathed. "You hold in your hand the trident of Atlantis." His sea-green eyes lifted to Marid, wide with a shock that no god should ever have shown a mortal. "That city has been lost since before your race learned to reckon time. Its very existence is half-legend even among us. How, Devil? How did this come to be in your keeping?"
"Honestly, my lord?" A faint, rueful smile touched Marid's lips. "By accident. As the very best discoveries always are."
He gestured to the broken relic as he spoke, and the tale unspooled.
"I was hunting a stray Devil, some time ago, through the cave systems of the Scandinavian coast, in the far north, in Norway. One of my standing contracts had flagged something curious in that region, a report of a strange, mythical forcefield lingering over a half-submerged network of sea caves. Now, I will be honest with you all, I am a creature of terrible curiosity, and the moment I heard the word forcefield I quite forgot the stray for a while, because a barrier means something is being protected, and a thing worth protecting is a thing worth finding." His eyes gleamed with the memory of it. "So down into the drowned caves I went. And deep within them, in a flooded and shattered chamber that should not have existed, I found the broken ruin of a city. Toppled columns. Streets of a make I had never seen. Architecture that belonged to no age or people I could name. And half-buried in the rubble of what had once been a great hall, this."
He touched the broken haft, gently.
"It was not until I had it in my hands, and worked out what it was, that I understood what I was truly standing in. That ruined, drowned city, tangled up in the Norwegian caves at the bottom of the cold north sea, was not some forgotten fishing settlement." He met Poseidon's gaze. "It was a piece of Atlantis itself. A fragment of the drowned kingdom, carried impossibly far from where it fell."
"Impossible," Athena said, though there was no certainty in it, only wonder. "Atlantis sank in the warm waters of the ancient world, far from any northern shore. How would its ruins come to rest beneath the coast of Norway?"
"That is the part I can only guess at," Marid admitted. "But I have a guess, and I believe it is a sound one. You will all know the manner of Atlantis's fall better than I, but permit me to speak it plainly for the sake of my companions." His voice grew grave. "King Atlas was, by every account, a genius without equal among mortals. A king, a scholar, an experimenter whose ambitions reached beyond what any mortal mind should safely hold. But he was also, at the end, mad, his brilliance curdled somewhere along the way into something reckless and blind. His experiments grew ever more daring, ever more blasphemous, reaching for powers no mortal hand was ever meant to grasp, until at last one of those crazed workings went catastrophically wrong and dragged his entire kingdom down beneath the sea in a single night of ruin."
The gods were silent, grave. More than one of them, it seemed, found the theory uncomfortably plausible.
"And when the city sank," Marid continued, "its pieces scattered into the deep currents of the world's oceans. And this trident, my lord, broken and drained of nearly all its power, was light enough, and quiet enough, to be carried by the great cold rivers of the sea, the North Atlantic currents, all the long way from the warm graves of Atlantis to the frozen caves of Norway, where it finally came to rest." He shrugged. "In its whole and mighty form, a relic like this would have blazed like a beacon; every treasure-hunter and power-broker in the world would have felt it and come running. But broken as it is, so much of its power spent and lost, it had grown quiet. Too quiet to be sensed at a distance. Too quiet to be found by anyone who did not, by sheer chance, physically lay eyes upon it in the dark." A small, wry smile. "Which is precisely what a curious Devil chasing a forcefield happened to do."
He stepped back from the table, leaving the broken trident gleaming upon the stone before its god.
"It is not mine, Lord Poseidon," Marid said simply. "It never was. It is a piece of your own blood's legacy, a shard of a drowned kingdom fathered by your line, and I would no more keep it than I would keep a stranger's heirloom pulled from a shipwreck. I return it to you, freely, and with no price attached. Consider it… a gesture. A small proof that when I speak of peace and good faith, I mean the words." A faint smile. "And perhaps a small apology, from a broker who has profited from a great many of this world's lost things, for occasionally being the sort of person who finds them."
For a long, long moment, Poseidon simply looked at the broken trident of his drowned descendants.
Then, slowly, the Lord of the Sea reached out and took it up in one great hand, and as his fingers closed around the ancient haft, a low, resonant hum filled the chamber, and beyond the terrace, the Mediterranean itself rose in a single great, joyful swell and crashed against the shore, as though the ocean had reached up to welcome home a lost and beloved child.
When Poseidon looked up at Marid again, something fundamental had changed in the god's ancient eyes.
"…You are a strange creature, Devil," Poseidon said quietly. "I have lived longer than your race has existed, and I did not think there was a kind of person left in this world I had not seen. And yet here you are." He looked down at the trident, and his weathered features softened by some immeasurable degree. "You could have sold this. To me, to a rival pantheon, to any of a hundred powers who would have emptied their vaults for it. You could have hoarded it, studied it, used it as leverage in this very negotiation. Instead you simply… give it back. Asking nothing." He shook his great head slowly. "I will not forget this. The sea does not forget its debts, young Gremory. Remember that, in the days to come. The sea does not forget."
Marid bowed low. "You honor me, Lord Poseidon."
The Accord
After that, the shape of the thing came together with surprising speed.
It was not, in the end, the grand and total peace that Serafall had privately hoped for; the enmity of ages does not dissolve in an afternoon, and there remained a great deal that Devil and Olympian did not trust in one another. But it was something. It was the first true bridge built between the Underworld and Olympus in the whole of their long, wary history, and it took the shape that Marid had known, from the very first, that it would: not a treaty of love, but a treaty of trade.
The concessions from the Devil side were considerable, and Serafall gave them with the grace of a ruler who understood exactly what she was buying. Chief among them, to Marid's private amusement and Zeus's frank delight, was the promise of Marid's own alcoholic concoction, the rare, potent, painstakingly-brewed vintage the Olympians had developed such a fondness for, to be supplied to the halls of Olympus at a rate so generously discounted that it bordered on the ruinous. There were other terms besides, safe passages and trade routes and the quiet exchange of certain goods and courtesies, the ten thousand small threads from which a lasting peace is woven. But the wine, everyone agreed, was the keystone. Gods, it turned out, were not so very different from anyone else when it came to a drink they could not get anywhere else.
The matter of the Rating Games was left deliberately open, a door propped ajar rather than flung wide. Both Artemis and Apollon had made their interest plain, the huntress with sharp, pointed questions about the rules of engagement and the hunter with an idle, gleaming curiosity that fooled no one, but no firm agreement was struck. It was, all parties acknowledged, a matter far too large and too delicate to settle in the tail end of a single meeting. Instead it was set aside as a promising seed, to be tended at a later date; Ajuka Beelzebub and Serafall Leviathan would return to treat with the Olympians in the fullness of time, to discuss in earnest the wild and unprecedented notion of Spartans, of demigods, and perhaps one day even of gods themselves, taking the field in the Rating Games against the very strongest teams the Underworld could muster. It was a conversation for another season. But it was a conversation that would happen, and both sides left the table knowing it.
And with that, with concessions given and a bridge of commerce laid across the ancient divide, the gods of Olympus and the Devils of the Underworld made their peace.
Zeus rose, and raised his great hands, and this time when he brought them together the thunderclap that rolled out across the sea was not the opening of a battle, but the sealing of an accord.
"So it is agreed," the King of Olympus declared, and though gruffness remained in his voice, there was satisfaction beneath it. "Let it be written, and let it hold. Olympus and the Underworld are not friends this day. But they are not enemies either. And in an age such as ours, that is no small thing." His lightning-pale eyes settled on Marid, and there was a glint in them that might almost have been fondness. "No small thing at all."
Farewells
In the loosening hour that followed, as the formal weight of the meeting gave way to the smaller courtesies that come after, an unexpected thing happened.
Yumi, who had stood in silent, watchful attendance behind her King throughout the entire negotiation, gave Marid the gentlest of nudges. When he glanced back at her, she was blushing faintly, her composure cracked for the first time all evening, and her eyes kept darting toward the far end of the table, where the goddess Artemis sat cleaning an arrow with the idle precision of a huntress at rest.
"…Lord Marid," Yumi murmured, mortified and hopeful in equal measure. "Would you… that is, might you introduce me? To Lady Artemis? I would not presume to approach a goddess on my own, but I—" She swallowed. "I should very much like to."
Marid, who missed very little where his peerage was concerned, took in the blush and the hope and the nervous set of her shoulders, and understood at once. A small, warm smile touched his lips.
"Of course," he said, and rose, and drew her forward with him.
Artemis looked up as they approached, and her moon-pale eyes were cool, guarded, the reflexive wariness of a goddess who had learned across long ages to keep Devils at arm's length. "Gremory," she acknowledged. Her gaze slid to Yumi, and cooled further. "And one of your servants. What is it you want, little Devil?"
Yumi flinched at the coldness, but she did not retreat. She drew a steadying breath, bowed low and properly, and when she straightened her voice was quiet but did not waver.
"Lady Artemis. My name is Yumi. I know I have no right to ask a goddess for anything, and I will understand entirely if the request offends. But I wished to ask, all the same." She lifted her chin. "Would you permit me… to pray to you? In my own quiet hours. If it would not be an insult to your name."
Artemis went very still. Of all the things she might have expected a Devil to ask of her, this was not among them. The cool guardedness on her face gave way, for a moment, to open, startled surprise.
"…You wish to pray to me," the goddess repeated slowly. "You. A Devil. A creature whose very nature recoils from the holy." Her silver eyes narrowed, searching for the trick, the angle, the hidden blade. "Why? What game is this?"
"No game, my lady. Only a wish." Yumi's expression softened into something earnest and unguarded. "I was raised in the church, before I was ever a Devil. And even then, even as a frightened child among the faithful, I was fascinated by the stories of you. The huntress who answers to no one. The protector of maidens and of the wild places. The light that guides every hunter through the dark." A small, wistful smile touched her lips. "I loved those stories, before I knew what I would become. And I find that becoming a Devil did not change what moved me in them. You are the light of every hunter who has ever been lost in the night, Lady Artemis. I should simply like to honor that. Nothing more."
For a moment, the huntress-goddess did not answer. Her gaze flicked, sharp and questioning, to Athena, as though seeking counsel, and it was the war-goddess who gave voice to the obvious objection.
"And what," Athena asked coolly, watching Yumi with keen grey eyes, "would the other Devils make of this? Of one of their own bowing her head to an Olympian goddess in the dark? Your kind are not known for their tolerance of divided loyalties, little bishop. Would they not name you traitor for it?"
Yumi turned to face the war-goddess, and something in her quiet spine straightened into steel.
"With respect, Lady Athena," she said, "I do not much care what they would make of it."
A ripple of surprise went through the gods.
"I have spent enough of my life doing what frightened people demanded of me, afraid of what they would think, afraid of what they would do." Yumi's voice was soft but utterly certain. "I do not intend to spend the rest of it that way. As long as my King permits it, then their opinions are no concern of mine. I follow my heart, my lady, as I have always tried to do, even when it cost me. And my heart wishes to honor the Goddess of the Hunt." She bowed her head then, low and respectful, toward the goddess herself. "The only leave I require is his. And I have never once known him to forbid me a thing that brought me joy and harmed no one."
Every eye in that part of the hall turned, then, to Marid.
The son of Lucifer said not a single word. He did not need to. He merely met the assembled gods' gazes, one after another, and let a slow, proud smile spread across his face, and in that smile was written, plain as any decree: she speaks for me. If the Goddess consents, then so do I.
Artemis looked between the two of them, the earnest young Devil and her silent, smiling King, for a long, weighing moment. And then, slowly, the last of the frost melted from the huntress-goddess's expression, replaced by something that was almost, almost, warmth.
"…Well," Artemis said, and there was the ghost of wry amusement in it now. "It has been a very long age since anyone asked to pray to me at all, let alone a Devil with the honesty to say she cares nothing for what her own kind thinks of it." A rare, small smile touched her lips. "You have a huntress's spine, girl. I will grant you that much. Very well. You have my leave. Pray to me, if it brings you comfort, and I shall not take it as an insult."
Yumi's whole face lit up with a joy so pure and unguarded that even Athena's stern expression softened by a fraction.
"Come here, child," Artemis said, beckoning her closer, and for the next few minutes the Goddess of the Hunt bent her ancient head toward the young Devil and taught her, in a low and patient voice, the old ways of a hunter's prayer, how to offer it beneath the open night sky, how to time it to the turning of the moon. "Your voice will carry farthest to me in the dark," the goddess murmured, "and strongest of all on the night the moon is full. Remember that. On the full moon, the wild is closest to the world, and so am I."
Yumi listened as though committing scripture to memory, her eyes shining, and Marid watched his bishop receive the blessing of an Olympian goddess with a quiet, private pride that no negotiation could ever have bought him.
Nearby, a very different sort of reunion was unfolding.
Apollon had drifted over to where Kenta stood, drawn by the ring upon the Kuroshishi's finger and the old friend who dwelled within it, and the god and the fire-serpent had fallen at once into the easy, overlapping conversation of two souls with centuries of catching up to do. They spoke of old places and old faces, of the changing of the ages, of a hundred small things that meant nothing to anyone but the two of them and everything to each other. And through it all, Kenta stood beside his own hand in a state of profound and awkward awe, an enormous lion of a young man reduced to shuffling silence by the sheer surreal weight of standing an arm's length from a god of the sun who was chatting with the spirit that lived in his soul.
He was doing his very best to be invisible. He was not succeeding.
Apollon's bright, clever eyes flicked to him mid-sentence, catching the Kuroshishi in the act of staring, and the god's handsome mouth curved into an amused, faintly wicked smile.
"You may as well breathe, Devil," Apollon said dryly. "You have been holding it for the better part of a minute. I promise I do not bite, at least not the friends of old friends." His smile sharpened into something teasing. "Though I will say, I can feel the shape of your strength from here, and I hope you are not entertaining any grand notions. You are a fine young warrior, I am sure, by the reckoning of your own kind. But you are far, far too weak to so much as challenge me, let alone win. It would be no contest at all. Best you not even dream of it."
Kenta blinked, caught utterly off guard, and went a deep and mortified red. "I—I wasn't—Lord Apollon, I would never presume to—"
The stammering was so immediate and so sincere that Adara's warm laughter came crackling up from the ring, and Apollon himself chuckled, delighted at having flustered the poor boy so thoroughly.
But then the fire-serpent's laughter softened into something fonder, and the ring pulsed, and Adara spoke again, and this time there was no jest in it at all.
"Do not sell my host so short, old friend," she said warmly. "Oh, you are right, of course. Today the gap between you is an ocean, and Kenta could no more challenge you than a candle could challenge the noon sun. That much is simply true." The flame flickered, and warmed, and there was in it the quiet certainty of a creature who did not know how to lie. "But mark my words, Apollon. I have dwelt in this boy's soul only a short while, a handful of weeks, no more, and already I have felt the shape of what he is becoming. I have worn many hosts across many ages, and I know the feel of true potential when it stirs beneath me. And I tell you plainly, the day is not so very far off as you might think when Kenta stands before you, no longer as a candle, but as a fire in his own right, and gives even a god of the sun a very good fight indeed. I have never once known you to doubt my word. Do not start now."
For a moment, both Apollon and Kenta stared at the ring in equal astonishment, the god and the boy united in identical surprise.
And then Apollon threw back his golden head and laughed, bright and genuine and full of delight, for he had known Adara across the whole long span of her strange existence, and he knew, better than anyone alive, that the fire-serpent did not flatter and did not fabricate and did not say a single thing she did not believe to be true.
"Is that so," the sun-god said, wiping mirth from his bright eyes, and he regarded the enormous, blushing young Devil before him with new and genuine interest. "Adara does not exaggerate. Not ever. If she says the day will come when you can give me a fight, boy, then I am forced to believe that it will." His smile turned warm, and something almost like anticipation kindled behind it. "Well then, Kenta of the Kuroshishi. I shall hold you to it. Grow strong. Become the fire she sees in you. And when the day comes that you can stand before me and make me work for it…" he clapped a golden hand upon the awestruck young Devil's massive shoulder, "…I shall look forward to that day very much indeed. Do not keep an old god waiting too long."
And Kenta, utterly overwhelmed, could do nothing but nod, and stammer, and glow with a pride he would be trying to put into words for weeks to come.
Olympus, After
The golden light of the Greek summoning circle rose and swallowed the Devil delegation, and in the space of a breath they were gone, back across the world to the violet skies of the Underworld, leaving the sunlit hall in Marbella quiet once more.
For a while, the gods of Olympus said nothing.
It was Poseidon who broke the silence at last, turning to his brother with the broken trident of Atlantis still cradled reverently in one great hand.
"You were reasonable with them," the Lord of the Sea observed, and there was curiosity in it, and no small amount of surprise. "More than reasonable. Zeus, you walked into that hall with a plan of action, I heard you lay it out yourself, and it bore very little resemblance to the accord you have just signed. You meant to press them harder. To take more, and give less, and keep the whip-hand at every turn." His sea-green eyes studied his brother. "And instead you gave a young Devil his say, and you listened, and in the end you dealt with them as near to equals as I have ever seen you deal with anyone. Why? What changed your course?"
Zeus was quiet for a long moment, his lightning-pale gaze fixed on the spot where the Devils had stood.
"I know what I did, brother," the King of Olympus said at last, and there was something thoughtful, almost bemused, in his rumbling voice. "Believe me, no one is more surprised by it than I am. I walked in meaning to grind them down, as you say. And then that crimson-haired whelp opened his mouth, and something about the boy was… different. I have sat across from a great many mortals and immortals in my long reign, brother, and I have learned to know the shape of a soul worth taking seriously. This one had it. Young as he is, there is something in that boy that the world is going to have to reckon with, and I found I would rather have him remember Olympus as reasonable than as an enemy, when that day comes."
He shifted his great weight, and his lightning-pale eyes grew thoughtful and distant.
"And there is more than the boy himself," Zeus went on, quieter now. "He does not walk into my hall unbacked, whatever pains he took to hide it. Oh, he never once said so, and neither did the fire-serpent, and I will grant the brat this much: he was far too proud to wave such a thing about to purchase himself an easy hearing. But I felt the shape of it all the same. Someone of no small weight in this world holds that boy in high regard. And that someone saw fit, before ever the Devils crossed into my hall, to send a quiet word ahead to me, and to ask, as a personal favor, that I hear these Devils out with an open ear." His pale eyes glinted. "I will keep the name behind my teeth, brother, even from you, for it was given to me in confidence, and I do not squander such things. But understand what it means. The sort of figure who would trouble themselves to vouch for a young Devil, and spend a favor with me to do it, is not a figure whose request I refuse without very good cause. That alone bought the boy his hearing, before he had spoken a single word." His jaw tightened, and his eyes moved, just for a moment, to where Heracles stood glowering in the shadows. "And then there is this. You heard the fire-serpent's tale, same as I did. You heard what a son of that proud, foolish bloodline did to her, and to Siegfried, and to the peace between Olympus and Asgard, all to salve one bruised and worthless ego." He let out a slow, rumbling breath. "Our house has sins to answer for, brother. Old ones. When a creature wronged by our own blood stands before me and speaks, honestly, for peace, and asks nothing but the chance of it… I find I owe it to the ledger of our name to give the young brat a fair hearing. So I did."
He was silent a moment longer. And then, unexpectedly, the great King of Olympus smiled.
"And I will tell you this, Poseidon, and you may hold me to it," Zeus rumbled, warm and certain. "I am glad that I did."
Poseidon looked down at the trident of his drowned descendants, gleaming softly in his hand, and thought of a strange young Devil who gave back lost things asking nothing in return.
"…Aye," the Lord of the Sea agreed quietly. "So am I, brother. So am I."
The Underworld
The golden light deposited the delegation back onto the reinforced plateau near the Thorns, beneath the vast artificial moon and the endless violet sky, and Marid let out a long, weary breath, rolling the tension from his shoulders.
"Serafall-sama," he said, once the hundred guards had begun to disperse and the returned party had a moment's quiet, "I have a question I have been holding onto for the entire meeting, and I would like an honest answer, if you please." He turned to the Maou, one eyebrow raised. "Why, exactly, did I need to be there at all? You are a Maou. You negotiate with gods and kings as a matter of course. You had your Queen and your Knight at your back, two of the strongest women in the Underworld. You did not need a teenage information broker to hold your hand across that table." He folded his arms. "So why drag me halfway across the world and set me down in front of the King of Olympus? What was the point of me?"
Serafall, who had been humming a cheerful little tune to herself, turned to him with a smile that was, for once, entirely without mischief. It was warm, and knowing, and unexpectedly fond.
"Oh, Mari-chan," she said. "You truly do not see it, do you?" She reached up and patted his cheek, and he was too surprised to stop her. "I brought you along so that you could get your flowers."
Marid blinked. "My… flowers."
"Your due! Your credit! Your recognition, silly boy!" She spun in a little circle, ribbons flaring. "Do you have any idea what you did in that hall today? Any idea at all?" Her voice, beneath its brightness, had gone genuinely serious. "We did not achieve the grand peace, no. I will not pretend we walked out of there arm in arm with Olympus singing our praises. But Marid." She stopped spinning and looked at him squarely. "You stopped a war. A real one. A war that would have carved another poisoned plain into the face of the world, the kind you showed your little ones on the way here. You looked the King of the Gods in the eye when he threatened to end us all, and you did not blink, and you talked him down. And then, as if that were not enough, you went and did something no Devil has managed in the whole of our long and infamously distrusted history." A slow, proud grin spread across her face. "You established a trade agreement with the Olympian gods. A genuine, standing, mutually-beneficial accord. Do you understand how many Maous have tried to build a bridge like that and failed, purely because the moment the other side hears the word Devil they reach for a weapon? And you did it at eighteen, on your first outing, with a broken trident and a clever tongue and an honest heart." She poked him in the chest. "So no. I did not need you there to win. I brought you so that everyone, the gods, the Satans, and most of all you, would see exactly what you are capable of. You earned your flowers today, Marid of Gremory. I simply made sure you were standing somewhere you could be handed them."
For a moment, Marid, who always had something clever to say, found that he had nothing at all.
"…Thank you, Serafall-sama," he managed at last, and it was quiet, and it was sincere. "Truly. That means a great deal, coming from you."
"Of course it does. I am very wise and very kind. It says so on my show." She beamed, the mischief flooding back all at once. "Now! Let us go and tell my fellow Satans all about how magnificent we were—"
"Lord Marid."
The voice cut in, low and taut, and both of them turned. It was Yumi, and the joy she had carried out of Olympus had drained away, replaced by a tight, restless unease that pulled her brow into a frown. Beside her, Kenta had gone quiet and watchful, sensing his King's bishop's disquiet.
"Forgive me for interrupting," Yumi said, "but I must ask something of you. I would like your leave for Kenta and myself to return to Kuoh. Now. Ahead of the rest." Her hands were knotted together before her. "I cannot explain it fully. But ever since we crossed back over, I have felt… wrong. Uneasy in a way I cannot shake. And I think I know why." Her jaw tightened. "The Excalibur fragments are in Kuoh. And so is Kiba. In the same city, under the same sky, and every hour we are away that knot pulls tighter in my chest." She swallowed. "I have made my peace with the Holy Swords, Lord Marid. Truly, I have. Whatever was done to us in that project, I have set it down; I do not carry the blade's grudge anymore." A shadow crossed her face. "But my baby brother still does. Kiba never learned to set it down the way I did. And with those fragments so near to him, and no one older left in the city to steady him, I am afraid for him. I need to go home. Please."
Marid regarded her for a long moment, and he thought of every word he had spoken to Kenta on the walk to this very plateau, hours and a world ago. Kiba is going to run. And Issie will follow him.
He did not doubt, now, that it had already begun.
"…Go," Marid said gently. "Both of you. Of course. I would sooner you were there than here." His expression hardened into something serious. "Find them, Yumi. Find Kiba, and find Issie, for I would wager a great deal that the two of them are already together and already halfway into trouble. Steady them if you can. Protect them if you must. And if it comes to something you cannot handle…" his lightning-blue eyes flashed, "…you call for help. Immediately. Do you understand me? You do not try to carry it alone. That is an order, and it is the only one I will give you today."
"Yes, Lord Marid." Relief flooded Yumi's features, and she bowed deeply. "Thank you. Thank you." She straightened, and there was steel in her again, the steadiness of a woman who finally had somewhere to put her worry. "We will not fail you. Come, Kenta."
"Right behind you," the Kuroshishi rumbled, already conjuring the crimson glow of a Gremory transport circle beneath their feet.
And in a flash of red, the two of them were gone, back toward Kuoh, and toward the storm that Marid had seen coming from the very first.
He watched the space where they had been for a moment, a small frown tugging at his mouth, an unease of his own beginning, very faintly, to stir.
"Come, Serafall-sama," he said at last, shaking it off. "Let us go and get our flowers. And then I think I should very much like to check on my city."
Lilith, Later
Word of what had been achieved in Marbella traveled fast, as such things always did in the Underworld, and by the time Marid and Serafall arrived in the great halls of the Devil capital to make their report, a considerable gathering had already assembled to receive them.
The announcement, when it was made, landed like a thunderbolt of a very different kind than the one Marid had faced across the Olympian table. A standing accord with the gods of Olympus. A trade agreement, the first of its kind, brokered with a pantheon that had regarded the Devil race with cold suspicion for the whole of recorded history. The return of the Greek heroes, the averting of a war that few outside the highest circles had even known was brewing. It was, by any measure, a triumph, and the hall received it as one.
The four Maous were the first to offer their congratulations, and they were warm and genuine. Ajuka Beelzebub, who understood better than anyone present the sheer diplomatic weight of what had been accomplished, gave Marid a rare nod of unqualified approval and a few quiet words about the Rating Game discussions to come. Falbium Asmodeus grunted something that, for Falbium, constituted effusive praise. And Sirzechs Lucifer, Marid's father, looked upon his eldest son with a pride he did not trouble to hide, though the demands of his station kept his outward warmth measured.
After the Maous came the leaders of the great Devil houses, the heads of the surviving families of the Seventy-Two Pillars, or at least those among them whose loyalties lay with the current regime rather than with the old, defeated dream. They came forward in ones and twos to offer their respects and their congratulations, and most of them meant it; a peace with Olympus was good for every Devil in the Underworld, and the young Gremory who had helped broker it had earned a great deal of standing this day.
Not all of the congratulations were sincere, of course.
The representatives of the families aligned with the Great Satan Faction, those houses that still, quietly, nursed their bitterness toward the ruling Maous and dreamed of the restoration of the old Satanic bloodlines, offered their words with visible reluctance. They could not be seen to snub so public a triumph; the social forms had to be observed, and so they observed them, mouthing the required congratulations through tight, insincere smiles that never once reached their eyes. It was the bare minimum that courtesy demanded, and not a hair more, and everyone in the hall knew exactly what it was worth. Marid received their hollow praise with the same gracious, unbothered smile he gave everyone, and privately filed each stiff, resentful face away, as he filed away all things. One never knew when such knowledge might prove useful.
And then there were his friends.
Amid the sea of dutiful and politically-minded well-wishers, four figures cut through with congratulations that were entirely, unmistakably genuine, for they came not from rivals or courtiers but from the young Devils who stood at the very peak of their generation alongside Marid himself, four of his fellow members of the Big Eight. Sairaorg Bael reached him first, and the mighty heir of the Great King's line clasped Marid's forearm in a grip that could have cracked stone, a fierce grin splitting his face. "A war stopped and a bridge built, and not a single punch thrown," the muscular Devil rumbled, with the frank admiration of a man who respected results however they were won. "You continue to make the rest of us look lazy, Marid. Well done. Truly." Beside him, Seekvaira Agares adjusted her glasses and offered a crisp, measured nod that, from the famously reserved heiress of Agares, carried more weight than another's gushing ever could. "A standing trade accord with the Olympians. The logistics alone are staggering; I should very much like to read the full terms when they are drawn up." Dagon Glasya-Labolas clapped him on the shoulder with an easy laugh and a cheerful complaint that Marid was hogging all the interesting work in the Underworld for himself. And Cleria Belial, elegant and sharp-eyed, regarded him with the cool, knowing smile of a woman who understood exactly how much quiet cunning the afternoon must have demanded. "The whole Underworld will be talking of this for a decade," she murmured. "Do try to look a little less pleased with yourself about it, Gremory. It is unbecoming." But there was warmth beneath the tease, and of all the acclaim the hall had to offer that evening, Marid found the regard of these four the most welcome by far, for it came from equals, and from friends.
It was, all in all, a fine and well-earned moment, a rare hour of unambiguous victory in a life that had known precious few of them. Marid stood in the great hall of the Devil capital, receiving the acclaim of his people, his father's proud gaze warm upon him, and allowed himself, for the first time in what felt like a very long while, to simply enjoy it.
It did not last.
Marid felt it before he understood it, a sudden pressure against the side of his skull, an intricate lattice of magic assembling itself with urgent, focused precision. A communication circle, and not one of the ordinary kind. This one was fine and complex and private, keyed directly to him, the sort of channel that opened only for news that could not wait and could not be overheard.
Several of those nearest him noticed at once. The delicate glow of the forming circle at his temple drew curious, and then wary, glances from the assembled Devils, for such a thing appearing in the midst of a celebration was rarely a herald of good tidings.
Marid opened the channel.
He listened.
And the hall watched, in a silence that spread outward from him like a stain, as the joy drained from Marid Gremory's face.
It happened all at once. The easy, gracious pleasure of a moment before curdled and vanished, and in its place something cold and terrible rose up behind his lightning-blue eyes. His jaw set. His shoulders went rigid. And the warm, peaceable aura that had filled the space around him, the aura of a young man savoring a hard-won triumph, snuffed out like a candle and was replaced, in the space of a single indrawn breath, by a pressure so cold and so furious that the nearest Devils flinched bodily away from him. Even some of his own friends, scattered through the gathering, stared at the sudden transformation with open unease, for they had almost never seen that particular expression on Marid's face, and they had never once seen it and been glad of it.
When Marid closed the channel and opened his eyes, he found the entire hall watching him with dawning alarm.
His gaze swept across them, across the wary faces of the crowd, across his friends' worried stares. And then it found his father.
Sirzechs Lucifer stood at the head of the hall, and his face was the most perfectly composed thing in all the world. Utterly stoic. Utterly still. A mask of serene, untroubled calm so complete that a stranger might have thought the Lucifer had heard nothing at all. But Marid was not a stranger. Marid was his son. And Marid could see, plain as day, the thing that mask was built to hide: for behind Sirzechs Lucifer's glowing crimson eyes, a rage of truly apocalyptic proportions was churning, a storm barely, barely held in check, the fury of a father and a king who had, in the very same moment as his son, just received the very same terrible news through a Gremory communication circle of his own.
Father and son looked at one another across the length of the silent hall, and no words passed between them, for none were needed. They already knew. They both already knew.
Marid turned to face the gathered Devils. He drew a slow breath.
And into the ringing, expectant silence of that hall of celebration, the eldest son of Lucifer spoke four words that fell like a blade, four words that sounded, in the ears of every soul who heard them, like the blowing of war horns across the whole of the Underworld.
"Kokabiel is attacking Kuoh."
Chapter End
Let's break down the big stuff! Marid absolutely COOKING at the negotiation table, using pure logic to disarm Zeus, was the scene I was most excited to write. That whole "you would win, and it would be the most expensive victory in ten thousand years" argument is exactly the kind of galaxy-brain diplomacy I love writing for him. Peace is good for business, baby!
And ADARA! We FINALLY got the fire-serpent's full backstory! Daughter of Medusa, raised by Apollon, betrayed by a Heraclid and poor deceived Siegfried, and the whole thing soured Olympus-Asgard relations for CENTURIES. And yes, Heracles being a descendant of the very bloodline that wronged her, sitting right there squirming through the whole story? Chef's kiss. That's going to matter later, trust me.
The Trident of Atlas was another one I've been sitting on forever. Marid the loot goblin strikes AGAIN, and this time he gives it back, because peace is good for business and the sea does not forget its debts. There's a whole lost-Atlantis rabbit hole I've been building toward for waaaay down the line, hehehe.
Yumi getting to pray to Artemis genuinely made me so happy to write, and Kenta getting hyped up by Adara in front of Apollon ("the day is not so far off when he gives even a god a good fight")? I love these kids.
And then… that ending. Yeah. You all knew it was coming. Marid predicted the Kiba and Issie situation to the letter back at the start, and now the other shoe has dropped. Next chapter, we go back to KUOH, and things are going to get LOUD. The calm is officially over.
As ALWAYS, please please PLEASE leave a comment and let me know what you thought! Constructive criticism is hugely appreciated, if something felt off or you spotted a plot hole, tell me, it genuinely makes the next chapter better. Your comments are my fuel!
And before you guys start to wonder why I have uploaded 2 chapters in a single week.... it's a birthday week special! Enjoy!!!!!!
Until next time, stay safe and have fun!
DGZalama out!
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