Demoncember writing prompt — Demon whose job is to liaison with heaven. They’re trying very hard not to get attached to their angelic counterpart
Chazakha walks the long corridor from the infernal side of the Mootspire, hands clasped, steps measured. The spire’s architecture was carefully chosen; the embassies to either side of the meeting chamber are set widely apart from each other, the airy conference chamber exactly in the centre, the whole thing spread out on a single level, neither side above nor below the other.
Chazakha was young, when it was built. The demon has seen both the public optimism, the spirit of fruitful compromise and civil exchange that ostensibly empowered its construction; and the private cynicism on both sides, that there are useful little agreements to come to, the grim conviction that this granular trickle of realpolitik is the only possible meaningful détente.
Chazakha itself has outlasted four of Heaven’s own delegates.
Chazakha is tall and ridged with external bone, long of limb. It becomes dressed, for these formal occasions, in a drape of fine and gauzy linen; beneath it, its knurls and crenellations have been highlighted, first by underscoring its recesses with a bath of dark and watery body paint, and then a dusting over its body’s osteous highlands by a team of succubi with gilt powder-laden brushes. It is fine, and magnificent, and tasteful, a horror-natomy in Sunday best.
Heaven’s delegates are each identical: whirling wheels of wings-flame-eyes. And Heaven fears Hell, so much; so much that it watches the behaviour of its own closer even than it does Chazakha’s, and thereby Hell’s. In its illustrious paranoia, it has withdrawn without explanation all four predecessors of the current diplomat. They will never be seen again. It is entirely possible that Heaven extruded them, in whatever way it might manufacture a being to order, and destroyed them the instant it mistook the richness of the steep of its own festering suspicion for any tinge of actual sympathy for Hell.
Chazakha pities them, the delegates. It doesn’t mean to; it never meant to. But each of them in turn, so earnest, so devoted to the great power that regards them as suspect simply for undertaking the duty which it implacably assigns to them....
The demon steps into the diplomatic chamber, as simultaneously its counterpart enters from the opposite side.
“Xariel,” Chazakha greets, calm and sonorous.
“Chazakha,” the angel says, and Chazakha gazes upon the pinwheel whirl of it, the rose-unfolding, whirlpool-spinning perpetual revolution at the heart of it; the lick of holy flame, the softness of feathers, the sting of penants’ punishment and the cold benevolence that believes in love through correctional torment.
Every time, in its privatemost heart, Chazakha wonders what it would feel like, to be enfolded within that spinning intimacy, burning away in the hostile radiance of Heaven’s love. Perhaps that’s what Heaven senses, why it tears away its diplomats, displeased with what they’ve come to.
Perhaps — more likely; Heaven is simply what Heaven is, the great surveiller, seething and schemeing. Chazakha presses its folded hands to the ribbed case of its chest, inclines its head.
“What business today?” it says. Professional. Detached. Polite.
