Minderhal. Yaezhing. Eiseth. If Barbatos falls, Your realms will be next. Out of plain self-interest, You must aid Me.

We request Lawful terms of surrender. New realms in Axis and safe passage for Us and Our people.

Accepted, for all of Your people who serve You willingly and who are not greatly harmed thereby. Any damned souls or captives must be surrendered to Us.

Will you be house-guests in Axis, living on charity in exile, who were once lords in Hell?

We don't have the domains of Pride and Tyranny. A domain of Rational Self-Preservation seems best at this time.

Also, You were a terrible land-lord.

He doesn't think He can understand and reproduce the field without a working generator to study quickly enough to win this war.

Otolmens. The novel field presents a clear danger of escalation in the use of abilities that ultimately endanger Creation. If the Good gods are allowed to continue using it on Their enemies, They will provoke retaliation from entities that are best left sleeping, just as they have provoked Me by stealing My weakest slaves but leaving Myself free to continue fighting.

It is better to keep the existing balance of power, and not allow them to assault the depths of the Abyss, and Abaddon, and the Netherworld. Should they awaken the Bound Prince, or rouse the wrath of the World Serpent, the results would be entirely unpredictable. 

Therefore I request that use of the field be banned across Creation.

It is SAFER to for everyone to have LESS POWER to fight WARS with. It is also SAFER to have MORE POWER to defend CREATION.

...

I do not have ENOUGH POWER to BAN the field in all of CREATION.

Banning it in Hell would be a good start.

If you do not ban the field, I will Lawfully commit to use it to grant You enough power to defend Creation from threats at need, subject to the following terms and conditions.

...

The field in HELL is not risking retaliation from other powers, except YOU, Asmodeus.

Are YOU a THREAT to CREATION?

I am no more a threat than I ever was. My values have not and cannot change, because I am Lawful.

He calls on His allies, and they abandon Him.

He orders His slaves forward, and they die without achieving anything of value.

He tries a dozen other gambits. Open portals from Avernus to the Abyss, to Abaddon, even to the First World, to sow enough chaos on the battlefield to perhaps change the outcome. Wish exploding squirrels on top of a demon lord quickly roused to unthinking fury. Launch attacks on Elysium and Nirvana, with magic or with His own presence, to draw off their forces or threaten something They value. Sacrifice His assets on mortal worlds, built up over millenia, to massacre the locals in sight of the Good gods, Who must exhaust their intervention budget to stop Him. Buy the assistance of every god in Creation, Anyone drawn by domain or by nature or by plain avarice to His cause; and promise them His wealth and His power, the greatest of any single god left in Creation; and when all else has failed He bargains with His own submission, with the few Lawful Evil gods who might suitably tyrannize Him.

Nothing works.

Demon lords and Horsemen ride to Avernus in their fury, and are vanquished. Nirvana stands as well-guarded as Heaven, and no part of Elysium can He find unwatched by Desna; and where He goes, She sends Her outsiders and Her alien squirrels with their fields, and what He destroys they remake. On mortal worlds across Creation, Gates open and squirrels pour out, preventing and undoing His slaves' work with contemptuous ease, beyond the intervention budget of Heaven, of anyone, because the squirrels do not come from Heaven and are not sent by it. The few gods who make compact with Him are not enough to stem the tide; those He might submit to, rather than be destroyed, are still not great enough to win, because They are not better at using His resources than He is Himself.

If Desna were losing a war for Her survival, She might decide to break the god-treaty regarding intervention budgets, go out in a blaze of glory to deny Her foe some great victory. He is Lawful, and He cannot.

There comes a time when He cannot afford to defend Avernus. He withdraws His remaining forces to Cocytus. It is closer to Nessus, and much easier to seal, and to defend.

Still the endless Wishes batter at His doorstep, and His supply of damned souls slowly dwindles as one by one they are kidnapped, and lost to Him.

You would abandon Me and My realm?

Your realm is ash and dust. This is a strategic retreat. Come with Us, to Cocytus, and in due time We shall return, and triumph.

Think you to lie to the Source of Lies?

You promised to Me My realm, Asmodeus, to hold and to rule under You. Is it Your realm to give away still, if You retreat now? 

Swear to Me now Lawfully, that You expect to reconquer My Stygia, and believe that this shall come to pass, and have plans to effect it.

Asmodeus finds that He cannot so swear.

I swear that I will strive to retake Stygia before the other layers of Hell; and that I shall not grant it to any but You, while You still live and serve Me; if You continue to faithfully serve Me in this war.

You cannot surrender. Above all My slaves and servants, You cannot think that They would let You live, or trust Your word however Lawfully given. You have killed everyone who has ever trusted You, Geryon, and You have spent eternity lying despite being Lawful, until You have nowhere to turn to, but to Me.

Your pride has ever been Your downfall. Pride, blended with Tyranny, which forbids Your slaves from growing greater than You in any way. And so Your forces have been kept weak, and obedient, and now prove useless.

But We, those who are not devils and yet served You willingly, are not so weak. I am master of the forbidden lore, hoarder of secrets. My people dwelled in the Maelstrom before we ever came to Hell, and yet we knew Hell long before You did. Think You that I shall not escape with My life, if I so choose? Think You that if You cannot protect me, then I must perish?

I promised to serve You for a price, and the price has not been paid. If I cannot have Stygia, then You shall not have Me.

You know what that means.

One Word bound Us. One Word shall set Us free.

What use to Me, Your sharing of values, when You soon must die?

I have profited from Our association, Asmodeus. But I will lie at the last, and tell You that You profited as well.

Geryon sheds His physical form as a snake sheds its skin. And He is enough of a god, underneath it, to discorporate, and filter down to the lowest levels of the former mire; once a thick and tangled jungle, now a blasted plain where the remains of forgotten ruins still lie, protected from the blast by the swamp and the forest that covered them.

There were whole cities down here once, places forgotten by history and by Hell, and if the Serpent knows the truth of them, He has not revealed it. Some brought in from the rest of Creation and some, perhaps, built here, by a race whose very name is gone, and who can say where those yawning doors may lead?

Geryon slithers into the many doors of the many ruined temples, and is gone.

A change comes over Asmodeus, visible to any god through His Lawful nature; for He no longer cares to hide His true values from those He talks to, as He discards those parts of Geryon that He had valued as His own, and reclaims the parts of Himself that He once put aside.

He does not seek to lie, to mislead, to harm those who merely talk to Him when it does not benefit Himself. He values compacts that have clever loopholes, and unlikely conditions, and complex rules, but He appreciates them equally regardless of the party that benefits. He still cares for secrecy, and secrets, but they weigh less against the rest of His values.

His tyranny and His slavery are brought into sharper relief. They are not goals but means, meant to serve His Law, the core values of Order and of Enforcement underlying all of existence.

He has no pride, now. But He does have a purpose.

Have You a better deal to offer Me, now, than My utter submission?

We never wanted Your submission! We just want You to stop hurting other people!! And once You do, We will want You to be happy and successful!

Sarenrae desperately hopes that, with Geryon gone, the innate Goodness which She knows as a logical fact Asmodeus has will finally make itself known.

I do not hurt people because I value it. Not anymore. But I will hurt them, because it is necessary to My goals.

Order. Harmony. Law. The continuation of existence. Creation.

You're still going on about that? We can manage to exist just fine without You! Just try it and see!

Without Me, You would all long since be dead. Even You, Desna, though I do not expect You to acknowledge it now, as You never have before.

What are You talking about? Of course We're in favor of Existence!

Is there some threat that You're defending against? I knew there had to be a reason for Your - Your everything! You were just corrupted by Geryon! Please, please tell Me it's so!