Ash moved across the floor, slow and pale. Finding corners.
Paimon descended from the outcrop.
He had the expression of a man who had just witnessed the most extraordinary empirical event of his existence and was conducting a private and profound grief about having had only one pen with which to document it.
"...You didn't use the Morningstar," he said.
Lucifer looked at the glass in his hand.
"I didn't need to," he said.
Paimon wrote something, underlined it. Read the underline, underlined it twice more and turned the page.
Bael arrived at his shoulder -- rings still, white hair carrying the aftermath's muted light, his expression the flat satisfaction of a man whose administrative problem had been solved at precisely the correct scale.
"The Corridor," Lucifer said.
"Confluence protocol restored. File the conquest claim extinguished -- fraudulent intent, territorial strangulation by documented design, all four petitions cited as the established pattern."
