“Perhaps unsurprisingly,” Ashtoreth began, “I’m an astonishingly perfect specimen of archfiend.”

  Matthews looked unamused. “Meaning?”

  She shrugged. “Dunno, exactly—other than that I’m myself. Dazel made it sound like I was sort of… hmm. You know how if you stand between two mirrors, you can only see an infinite number of mirrors stretching off in both directions if the mirrors are absolutely perfectly aligned, right?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea,” said Matthews. “But I think I take your meaning. You’re the perfectly aligned mirror?”

  She shrugged. “Somehow. Anyway, he thinks that because of my perfection, he can use me as the focus for a spell that will attack my whole race. But he needs an antithesis shard.”

  “Don’t we all,” said Matthews.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Probably.”

  Matthews laughed, though there really wasn’t much humor in it. “Both you and the Eldunari have made it clear that the shards can turn the tide of an entire war,” he said. “And perhaps more importantly, that we have to fear them more than any other tool your father might have in his arsenal. Having shards to counter enemy shards seems like a necessity for any long-term war.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “Yeah,” said Matthews. “And also sounds a bit familiar, for someone my age.”

  Ashtoreth shrugged. “War never changes?”

  “The problem is… the shards are very rare. They’re priceless, and they’re not created by powerful enemy monsters, but by the interactions between realms and the spaces outside them. Causing those conditions artificially would be about as easy as causing Mount Vesuvius to erupt with exactly thirty megajoules of energy—down to the second decimal point.”

  “Hell can’t even do it,” she agreed. “And they’re more advanced in the matter of artificial realms than anyone.”

  “The only use of a shard that we can actually confirm is you,” Matthews said. “We suspect, naturally, that the four archangels you fought used one to come here, or that one was involved in triggering the election right before you gained a substantial amount of levels.”

  “Hey yeah,” Ashtoreth said, scowling as she remembered. “I’m still mad about that.”

  A silence filled the room for a moment, and then Matthews continued. “In any case,” he said. “Give me the details on how you stole the shard from your mother—and where it came from, if you know.”

  Ashtoreth nodded. “Basically, I baited her into thinking she’d have a chance to eat me.”

  Matthews briefly closed his eyes. “All right…” he said. “I might need you to start earlier than there. Give us as much context as you can.”

  “Sure!” Ashtoreth said. “See, my mother and I used to play a sort of game. She’s got her own fortress in Paradise, right? But the kids aren’t allowed in it. It’s… hmm.” She frowned as she realized how much she would have to explain. “Actually, this might be harder than I thought.”

  “Take as much time as you need,” said Matthews.

  “Right. My mother wants to eat all her children—let’s start there.”

  Matthews said nothing, but the assistant who hung around him and usually took minutes briefly looked up from his notepad.

  “She doesn’t just want to eat me because I’m the choicest meat around, either. She despises me because she was forced to have me, and technically speaking I outrank her in Hell’s racial hierarchy. Now, I don’t really have more power than she does in Paradise—but I will as long as I conquer the world I was born to invade. I mean, it gets a little more complicated than that, because I’d still have to contend with my generation’s male, but the gist is: I’m a kid she never wanted that constantly reminds her of the inferiority that led to her being forced into having me in the first place.”

  “And this has to do with the antithesis shard, how?”

  “Because her whole emotional complex about all of that is really easy to manipulate!” Ashtoreth said, smiling. “Basically, there’s ways that I can mess up so badly that even my father would have let my mother eat me.”

  “All right.”

  “So my mother knows this and wants it to happen, right? Which means she’s happy to sort of… leave the door open for me. She lets me find ways to sneak into her fortress in Paradise, because I’m not allowed there. And if she catches me there interfering with her domain?” Ashtoreth’s smile became a grin. “Chomp!”

  “I have to say, you seem very chipper about all this.”

  “Well, yeah,” Ashtoreth said. “It’s a story about how I outsmarted everyone to save Earth.”

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  Matthews seemed to think about this for a moment, then gave a nod. “I suppose that makes sense.”

  “Anyway, I’m my father’s favorite daughter out of my generation, right? He likes my creativity and initiative. On the rare occasions that I get to see him, I keep trying to steer the conversation towards Baphomet as if I’m genuinely just curious. Really, though, it’s because I want to know when he’ll be ordering her out of Paradise and what I can say to her guards and majordomo to trick them into thinking I’m acting with his authority if I get caught—that way they’ll be too scared to hold me.”

  “Weren’t you level 1 at this point? No aspects?”

  “Yep! But they gave us all sorts of stuff to power us up and simulate having levels and a class so that we could train, remember?” She beamed. “I was so good that I could hoard some of our training materials away without anyone noticing—hold off on drinking all of the potion so I could save some for later, that sort of thing.”

  “All right.”

  “Anyway, father figures out that I’m manipulating mother’s hatred of me to sneak into her Fortress and steal her stuff or eat her favorite, uh…” She glanced at the notetaker. “—Stuff,” she finished quickly. “And he’s over the moon. His Little Ashes, playing Baphomet like a fiddle? How precious. He starts helping me out a bit, but only in his own way, which means I’ve still got to work to figure stuff out for myself.”

  Matthews was shaking his head in disapproval. “And if you make a mistake, here, he knows you’ll get eaten? That’s what he’s encouraging?”

  “Call them Lightbringer family values,” she said, smiling. Then she shrugged. “Look, the guy’s old. He can make a new daughter to dote on if it isn’t me—heck, he could probably have just moved onto another girl in my generation. But anyway, he wound up giving me an opening to sneak into the fortress and giving me a lead that eventually led to my being able to blackmail my mother’s majordomo into showing me where she keeps the real goodies.”

  “The shard.”

  “The shard!” Ashtoreth said. “And once it’s missing, mom doesn’t come after me for it publicly, right? Because then my father will know that she had it.”

  “And he’ll kill her, I presume?”

  Ashtoreth barked out a humorless laugh. “If she’s lucky.”

  “So you don’t know where the shard you stole originally came from?”

  “Nope!”

  “Or how to get a new one.”

  “Nope! It’s got something to do with the Near Ones. I think they make them in order to damage the system itself, somehow, because it’s what keeps them out of our reality. I traded mine to the system in exchange for its favor, but since we’re talking about Dazel… he knows how to use the shards in the way they’re meant. He knows how to use them to break the system itself.”

  “And given that he apparently waged war on Heaven, we can assume he has no problem doing so.”

  “Yep!”

  “The Eldunari absolutely do not use the shards in that manner,” Matthews said.

  “Figures.”

  “Which means we won’t even have a clear idea of how, exactly, Dazel was going to use you.”

  “Probably not.”

  Matthews gave a sigh that almost sounded relieved. “And given that Dazel claimed he created your species, it’s unlikely the Eldunari will be able to figure out what makes you eligible to be used as a focus for his spell, anyway.”

  “Huh. I didn’t think of that… but yeah.”

  “Which means the ‘sacrifice Ashtoreth,’ angle is a complete dead end for us.”

  “It is?”

  “Almost certainly,” said Matthews. “And that’s before we even crack open the Pandora’s Box of ethical issues we’d have to confront.”

  Ashtoreth opened her mouth to respond, then thought better of it. Surely any sane military commander would find it acceptable to sacrifice the life of a soldier—even their best soldier—to deal a blow to the enemy as long as that blow was damaging enough?

  Matthews seemed to read her expression. “The system and the powers that it’s given people have opened up new questions that we’ve never had to answer before. The fact is, some of our spellcasters, particularly the necromancers, have any number of ways to sacrifice sapient beings to hurt our enemies.”

  Ashtoreth remained silent, sure that whatever she might say if she opened her mouth would turn out to be wrong.

  “The conversations that follow from that fact are not, from what I gather, going in favor of those who advocate taking a strictly rational approach to the sacrifice of human life. With luck, the eggheads will get some humane rules down in writing before anyone ever gets wind of this and sees strapping you to the altar as a good deal.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” Matthews said, looking somewhat disturbed. “Nobody’s going to kill you because humanity’s greatest traitor apparently thought it was a good idea, not least of which because we don’t even know how or why.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Great!”

  “That said, one thing that is worth investigating is this perfection that Dazel apparently mentioned. Even if it can’t be used against your species in the way he meant, studying you might yield any number of insights that could help us.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So… you want me to be a lab goat?”

  “To put it bluntly, yes.”

  She shrugged. “Makes sense, I guess.”

  “We also want you to level,” he said. “You can use some of the primal Eldunari worlds so as to get practical experience with your new abilities as they come to you.”

  She broke out into a grin. “Really?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But before we do either of those things, we want to make you a lab goat for another reason.”

  She sagged a little. Of course she wasn’t going to get to farm just yet. “What do you need?”

  Matthews’ mouth was a hard line. “We need to find a way to get that fucking cat.”