Blasphemia Ii: Deus Vult

White.

That was all Judith was aware of. An eternal, silent void in which she floated - or was she prone? WIth no frame of reference, no horizon line in the distance, she had no way of knowing. Perhaps she was standing, still as a statue.

Cognizant thought came back to her slowly, piece by piece. Fragments of memory snapped into place like pieces of a puzzle, the timeline of her life coalescing in her mind. Obscure birth. Brutal training. Awakening. Rome upended. Her utter failure to protect anything worth saving.

Falling. Dissolving. Dying.

Judith's eyes snapped into focus, even though there was nothing to stare at but vast, unending white. It was different than the blackness that had swallowed her repeatedly over the past few days. Rather than being oppressive, this endless void of singular hue simply...was. No beginning. No ending. Just emptiness. There was only one place it could be.

"Purgatorio," Judith murmured, her voice carried away by an unseen wind. The place she always knew she would end up eventually - not the strange realm that Satan had called Purgatory during the Saint Bethany's incident, the real thing. Neither the paradise of Heaven, nor the eternal torment of Hell. A simple empty vastness stretching from the universe's beginning to its eventual end. A place all who served the Templars would eventually pass on to. It was the act of ultimate sacrifice - live one's life in violence and sin in service to the Church and to God, enough to not cross into Paradise but not enough to fall as Lucifer did all those eons ago. Emptiness, forever.

How fitting a punishment. How fitting a fate.

Judith slowly sat up, her hair spilling down over her shoulders. She was naked, stripped of her armor and arms. She had no need of them any more. It was just as well. She crossed her legs underneath her, looking around her. One thing that had never been clear to her would be whether or not she would have company in Purgatory. Even if she had to spend eternity in this place, it would have been nice to have other Templar faithful to speak to in passing. It seemed, however, that the sentence would be a solitary one.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. Judith's body tightened, her legs squeezing together as she wrapped her arms around her torso and hung her head. There was quiet here, a certain kind of peace. Her body didn't hurt any more. Her mind was clear, free of mental exhaustion and the cloudiness that came from getting knocked around as she had. The space around her was warm and comfortable, non-oppressive, the kind of temperature that lulls the body into sleep.

Would she experience time the same way as she always had? Would it be slowed to a crawl, to draw out her sentence as much as possible? Or would she blink and a hundred years would have passed? What would even happen in a hundred years?

Her fingers clenched around her knees. Would Creation even have another hundred years? She had failed. Powerful as Filia was, there was no way the succubus could defeat a Before God on her own. There was nothing stopping Yog-Sothoth from breaking his shackles and remaking Creation as he saw fit. Eventually, he might even be able to break through to this place as well, to erase her from existence. How long before that happened? Minutes? Hours?

The full scope of her failure crashed down on her. Judith gave up being stoic. She wept, huge sobs wracking her body from head to toe. Pangs shot through her chest, and she clutched at her collarbone with trembling fingers to try something to stop the twisting in her heart. Her tears were invisible against the white void around her, but she felt them pattering on her thighs. Everything overwhelmed her, and she threw back her head and howled in anguish. The sound was like that of a wounded animal, the kind that knew its injury was fatal, given time. It was a primal noise, that of a creature knowing what fate held for it but unable to do anything about it. And Judith screamed it from the deepest core of her being.

She howled again and again, crying all the while, until she had nothing left, not even the strength to remain upright. So she let herself fall to the ground, curling up and continuing to weep. With time, her howling was reduced to whimpering, until all she could do was put her face in her hands. She had failed them all, her teacher, her allies - even her frenemy Filia. Now she was dead, and all she could do was cry.

As she finally managed to wrest some kind of control over herself, she heard a noise. It was faint at first, a susurration at the edge of her hearing. Minutes passed, and it grew louder, until it was clear to her. The noises were those like a carpenter at work, the scrape of metal and the soft hollow thunking of wood.

What apparition comes to taunt me now?

Slowly, Judith lowered her hands from her face and lifted her head.

A small distance away from her, a workbench had appeared. It was a simple thing, a flat wooden surface supported by four circular legs. Various carpenters' implements were scattered across the surface - a chisel, an awl, several mallets of varying sizes. In front of the table was a figure robed in white, its back to her.

Judith slowly got up, eyeing the figure warily. It made no move towards her, just continued to work with the implements on the table.

I'm already dead,

Judith thought.

There's little that can be done to me that's worse than that.

She crossed her arms over her chest to make herself modest, then walked closer to the table.

As she drew close, she saw the hands that were working. They were almost androgynous, nothing on them giving away the gender of the being they were attached to. There was no hair on them, but the digits were wide and strong, the nails clean and unblemished. Judith stopped and watched them work for a time. The figure was creating some kind of puzzle box, gently tapping precisely cut pieces of wood together. They came together to form a multiple-sided object that looked like nothing Judith had ever seen before.

Then, quick as a flash, stigmata appeared and vanished on the back of the figure's hands. Judith's eyes went wide. "You're...I know you."

The robed figure stopped working, resting its hands on the table. "You know

of

me. But this is the first time we have met."

The voice was hers, right down to the tone and cadence. Judith took a step back. "Who are you?"

The figure reached up, the hands now decidedly feminine. The stigmata reappeared as it drew the hood back. A face that was a mirror image of hers turned to regard her, right down to the minute scars on her brow and the recent acquisitions on her cheeks and neck. Though the eyes were the same hue, there was an age to them that Judith could hardly comprehend. "I may not be what you expect," her doppelganger said. "But I am who you think I am. I am who you carry with you everywhere. I am who you have always venerated."

Judith couldn't decide whether to run or fall to her knees. "Why are you me?" she asked.

Her doppelganger took up a piece of wood and an awl, and slowly began to work with the two. Shavings of wood fluttered to the surface of the table, one after the other. "Humankind was created in my image. But then again, I persist in humankind's image." She lifted a hand, stigmata shining scarlet in the light of the void. "An unforeseen development on my part."

"This is another trick," Judith deadpanned. "Another torture on the part of Yog-Sothoth, isn't it?"

"It could be." Her doppelganger kept working on the wood. "If that is what you believe it to be."

Judith frowned. "What does that mean? Things are, or they aren't."

"Are they?" More shavings fluttered down. "I appear to you as a mirror image of yourself. Am I you? Or are you me? Who am I? The answer is simple. I am everyone, yet I am no one. I exist, yet not in any form mankind could normally perceive." The doppelganger lifted up the wood piece, turning it over to examine it for flaws. "I am your God, yet I am also you."

Judith made a strangled noise. A part of her didn't want to believe it. A part of her

couldn't

believe it. But as she watched, she saw the phantom images flickering around her doppelganger like the aura off a halo. Different visages, different bodies, different faces. All races, all creeds. Humankind made manifest in a single entity, the same entity that had manifested them all.

"I don't understand, Lord," she whispered.

"Understanding is just as malleable as perception." The Lord waved a hand. "In our youth we think we know everything. Then, we grow older, and we find that we know nothing, and that many of our choices had been made in haste. The cycle repeats. Among gods, among men." A shrug of the shoulder. "Such is the way of things."

"I still don't understand!" Judith cried. "Where am I? Why are you here? What's happening on Earth?"

"You ask many questions." The awl scraped across the wood. "None are the one you want to ask the most."

"I..." Judith felt the words choke in her throat. To ask such a question to her God, right there in front of her, seemed tantamount to the highest heresy. But it was one she knew she had to ask. Her fingers closed into fists. "Where have you been?" she asked. "All this time, where have you been?"

The awl stopped mid-scrape. "Actions have consequences. They have been millenia in the making, and millenia yet to come. I barely had time to enjoy what I had Created before outside forces conspired to take it from me. Would that I could, I would not have abdicated my responsibility. I would have guided, would have safeguarded. But it was either that, or have all that I had made undone. Such has been my burden to bear."

"So you had to leave," Judith said. "You would've ruled in Heaven as befitting you, but the Before Gods pressing in on all sides demanded your attention. That's why you couldn't prevent any of this."

The Lord nodded once, then went back to working with the awl.

"But then what is this place?" Judith asked, looking around.

"This is a place of repose. Of solitude." The awl clattered on the workbench, and the Lord set about fitting the piece of wood into the strange configuration he was building. "The mind doesn't always need a full rest. Sometimes, a simple crafting project is enough to refocus and reattune."

"But I

died

," Judith insisted. "I fell into the pit of acid after having every bone in my body broken. I was weak and powerless, and I died the death I deserved. I couldn't save myself. I couldn't save anyone!" She was screaming, but didn't care. "I lived my entire life in service of the Church. In the service of you! This is my punishment! You can't

be

here!"

The Lord didn't react, simply focused on slotting the wooden piece into the puzzle. "You served a set of ideas, Judith Magdalena. Ideas are simply common thoughts, which come from humans, who I created, who also created me. You could say this is a truth, but truth is also as shapeable as wood." The Lord turned to her, and this time, Judith looked not into her face, but an empty cloak, filled only with soft golden light. A hand made of the same light tossed the wooden puzzle to her. Judith caught it out of instinct, finding the wood smooth to the touch and full of warmth. She turned it over in her hands, running her fingers along the seams.

"You are more than you think yourself to be," the Lord said. "All of mankind is. I created you, and you create me. You are not mankind, you are Nephilim, creation of divine and demonic. Yet both of those attributes came from me, and thus, also come from mankind. Therefore, to be Nephilim is to be human. To be human is to be divine. To be divine is to be Nephilim."

Judith's head spun as she slid a nail into the seam between two of the perfectly fit wooden pieces. "But then what are you?" she asked.

The light-filled cloak bowed its head. "I am what I oppose, but I do not oppose what I am. In that, there is peace."

Judith slowly worked her way to the center of the puzzle, sliding out pieces one by one. There was only one way to solve it, the shaped wood slotted together in perfect ways. When she reached the center, she found a cross-shaped piece that fit neatly in the palm of her hand. She closed her fingers around it, letting the warmth radiate into her skin. "I think...I understand."

"If you do, you shall find victory easily, and build a better world after it. If you do not...well, even I cannot pretend to be perfect."

Judith looked towards the cloak. That was the most straightforward thing that had been said to her the whole conversation. "You say you made mankind in your image, and that in turn we create you. But what did you create mankind out of?"

"Will. Sheer, unadulterated, uncompromised will. For what is the soul but the will to simply be, wrapped up a form that can be parsed by the limitations of flesh?"

Judith closed her eyes. Back to the obtuse answers. "I don't understand."

"There is no shame in not understanding. There is no shame in not knowing all the answers. But because I am flawed, an in turn you are flawed, monuments have been built to disguise that shame. Such monuments have defined the history of mankind, and in turn define me. Do you truly wish an end to this?"

Her fingers clenched around the cross. "Of course."

"Then you know what you must do. Grasp the will within, and you will come closer to understanding than any have before you."

When the Lord didn't say anything more after a while, Judith opened her eyes again. The light-filled cloak and the workbench were gone. The cross remained in her hand, simple and wooden, still radiating that comfortable warmth.

"The will within," she murmured. She closed her eyes again, and looked inward.

Nothing was different inside her mind. Her memories were all the same, with no strange repressed moments of her life coming to the fore. There was no spark of understanding, no sudden revelation. What had it all meant, then?

As she thought, more and more she focused on the first time she had ever beheld a crucifix, the simple wooden one that adorned the inside of the halls of the Templar facility underneath the Vatican. It was one of the few in the whole complex that didn't depict Christ suffering. It was just two simple wooden spars affixed together, a large thing that watched over the training space where she would spend much of her childhood being molded into a warrior. There was no telling what had happened to it since Rome's upending.

That symbol, two lines, had dominated her entire life. It was her entire identity. Church, faith, destiny - so much of her was attached to it. She had been taught that she wasn't a person, merely an instrument in the service of God. But if the relationship between mankind and God was symbiotic, then did that mean that the Templars made God an instrument in service of mankind? Were they simply reflections of one another, eternally pushing and pulling elements from each other in an endless cycle?

Judith thought carefully over what she'd been told. Mankind was formed from will. In turn, that will gave form to the Lord. They were deeply intertwined, and the more she thought about it, the more her head spun, but the more it made sense. There were elements of the human condition that philosophers, priests, and secular thinkers had spent centuries trying to understand, to put into terms the mortal mind was able to grasp. But it was okay to have mystery out there, to not understand everything. The knowledge that the vastness of existence was incomprehensible to human understanding was okay.

She

was okay.

Deep in her soul, Judith felt a spark. When she probed at it, it burned with the power of a thousand splendid suns. Her eyes snapped open. "Ego autem, sicut illud," she said.

As I will it.

She fell to her knees in a single fluid motion, pressing the crucifix to her breast. The wood rippled, then became a part of her. New strength flowed through her entire being, as the spark within scorched her soul. Her body changed. Muscles became denser, her strength growing exponentially in a few heartbeats. Power blazed through her hair, shooting it through with pure white. Wings flared into life along her back, not bursting from her skin in some grotesque transformation, but coalescing out of light as if they'd always been there and had needed to simply be invoked. It was the same rush of power she'd experienced when Lilith had given her a fraction of divine power during the fight with Azagthoth, but stronger by an order of magnitude.

Judith held out her hand, and Celerity appeared in it, as if the blade had never been gone. Her wings snapped out, flaring as wide as Filia's at full extension. It wasn't a question of whether she knew how to fly. It was a question of how fast could she.

Her wings snapped down at the same moment she jumped. The force of it propelled her upward like a missile, and the light shattered around her.

Judith burst from the pool of ooze, wreathed in golden light as she ascended to the top of the pit with one stroke of her wings. She shot up over the edge like a comet, crashing down next to the discarded Holy Lance. As her fingers closed around the weapon, she raised her head.

Filia, for all her efforts, had lost. She was a broken, bloody mess, swaying on her feet as she stood protectively over an eerily still Luca, defiant in the face of Yog-Sothoth's power. Her wings had been ripped clean off her body, the mangled stumps leaking black blood in thick rivulets down her back. One arm hung limp at her side, the other trembling as it held fast to a shadow chain.

Yog-Sothoth had been advancing on Filia, but had stopped when Judith had reappeared. His freakish face actually contorted into something resembling surprise. "How?" he rasped.

"Holy shit, since when did you have wings?" Filia spluttered. "Naked, winged Judith. Fuck, that's hot." Her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed.

Judith's hands clenched on her weapons.

If you don't defeat him, they die regardless. Kill him. Keep them safe.

"You were dead, Templar," Yog-Sothoth growled, levelling an accusatory finger at Judith. "How are you here? How do you have

that

power?"

Judith planted the butt end of the Holy Lance into the ground before her. Celerity clacked against the haft of the Lance as she raised it perpendicular, so that Yog-Sothoth would have to look upon the symbol of his enemy. Her faith. Her will.

"So He still insists on being meddlesome." Yog-Sothoth began to walk towards her, taking all the time in the world. "I shall rip that stolen power from your corpse, Templar."

Judith spoke, and her voice was layered with another that was her own, yet not.

"Through the ministry of the Church I hereby grant you pardon and peace, and absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."

She adjusted her balance, bringing both weapons to bare.

"Amen."

Yog-Sothoth let out a low chuckle as he moved into striking range. "Was that supposed to be a threat?"

"No." Celerity cleaved through the air faster than even the Before God could react, slicing his hand off at the wrist with a trail of fire. "It was a promise."

Yog-Sothoth grunted in genuine surprise as his hand flew off to the side. Judith wasted no time - this was the end, here and now. She attacked faster than any mortal ever could, goring Yog-Sothoth through the midriff with the Holy Lance and slicing his head off with Celerity. Golden holy fire flared to life along Judith's body, lighting the world around her.

Despite the quickness of her attacks, Yog-Sothoth was no fool. As his head bounced on the ground, the Before God ripped his body free of her weapon and moved back. Biomass from his arm rippled down like water, solidifying into a sword of bone. More tendrils hooked into his neck, dragging his head back across the ground to his shoulders. As Judith moved in close, Yog-Sothoth slashed across her torso, opening up a deep wound from shoulder to hip. He stabbed the bone sword through her, smiling in smug satisfaction.