Imagine the other end of it tho.
Imagine that time has passed almost back to where they had begun. Asmodeus knows the dateâof course he doesâand watches as an orc army destroys all the loves of his life. Again.
He cannot, of course, go and comfort his former self. That would be the temporal-mechanics equivalent of sticking a fork in a toaster and would probably set the universe on fire.
But what becomes of the souls of the dead here? Most particularly, that of his wife, who, one presumes, loves her husband, and for whom a good afterlife would of course include the promise of him being restored to her?
I can think of two possibilities. One, that she is brought to the Paradise of Io, and asks after her husbandâs fate, and watches as he becomes an adventurer, travels through time, and meets the fate he must shoulder to right the universeâat which point she would, trembling with some sort of hope mixed with fear, depart from the halls of Io to go and confront Asmodeus, whom she now knows to be her husband.
The other is that Asmodeus claims the three of them (or the one of them? perhaps she bargains for the release of her children to Ioâs halls), and gives them comfortable quarters in his palace and shows up for dinner every night, and she is frightened and angry and grieving but unharmed, and she asks him why she is here, why is she in his power, why is she comfortable and not tortured, et cetera. And he answers things like âthis is as it must be,â and when she presses further he asks if she will hear a story.
It may be some time before she agrees, but he will not tell it before then.
He tells her about a man, a follower of Io, who became an adventurer after the deaths of his family by a follower of Asmodeus. He tells her about that manâs adventures, about time travel, about a threat to the world and how that man and his companions met it and failed. And he tells her of the burden demanded of them, and the most terrible fate which one of them, the bravest of them, the best of them, shouldered: to become him.
The understanding that he is talking about her husband grows slowly in her, and the understanding that he who stands before her is her husband dawns more slowly than that, and the understanding that even though he is her husband, the man she knew and loved for his kindness and goodness, he is also everything Asmodeus is and can never again not be, comes upon her great and terrible like the advance of a glacier, and he stands up, not to approach her, but to unbar the door.
This path leads to the halls of Io, he tells her. She is more than deserving of paradise, he tells her. He will never bar or hinder her; she may go where she will. (This is a tweaking of the Rules, perhaps, permissible only because Io holds a claim on her for her own faith. Or perhaps, because his orders have killed her, it is his prerogative to do what he wants.)
She looks to the door, and she looks back to him. It is as heavy a choice, in its way, as his at the dawn of the universe, but with no press of duty in a singular direction to ease the making if not the consequences. He waits.
They say, afterwards, that Asmodeus the Lord of Evil has a wife. Nobody knows how, nor why, for she is kind and sweet, yet she is no captive, and she loves him. They call her the Lady of Mercy, or sometimes the Lady of Hope, and alone of all the universe he is said to raise no hand against her. They say he has a son, and a daughter, but these have yet to make themselves known. Sages and philosophers make much over the argument of whether Evil can love, but it is pointed out that Good can hate, and anyway, the other gods do not destroy Asmodeus when surely they must outpower him, but suffer his existence.
Asmodeus listens to their conversations sometimes, and perhaps smiles a bit as he continues his dread work. His Lady listens too, and smiles perhaps a bit more, and lays a soft hand over his, and they continue, jointly, to endure that great and terrible burden by which the universe may exist.
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