It took a long hour to restore some semblance of the living room's former pride, the debris gathered in a corner, the furniture put back in place.

  As soon as the cleaning was finished, Lucifer watched Adramelech go outside and lean against the railing of a walkway surrounding the house. Not that he didn't want to join him, but Lucifer hesitated greatly, for fear of disturbing him. Nevertheless, the man had been his friend, his steward, and his Infernal General for the past thousands of years; he owed him at least the truth about the reasons for his departure.

  The Devil rejoined his companion and leaned against the railing beside him, observing the interior. Though he felt the fallen one glance at him, neither dared speak for several minutes. Taking the lack of rejection as a first step, Lucifer began to relax.

  "Are you alright?" Adramelech asked him.

  "You still hit just as hard," replied the Devil.

  "I raise dragons," replied his interlocutor, as if that justified his power.

  “… “The Devil hesitated one last time before beginning. “To tell you that I was forced to leave overnight would be a lie, but to say that I chose to would not be entirely true either. That being said, I admit I didn't consider the consequences of my departure, neither for my people nor for my friends. I wish my apologies weren't so late, but alas, I had barely left Hell when it was already too late. So, a decade late: forgive me, Adramelech.”

  “You know, to say I resented you would be a fucking understatement. I hated you,” confessed Adramelech, whose feelings still lingered but with whom he seemed to have made peace. “So, when that other idiot Beelzebub seized power, well, I let him. Probably partly because I still resented you. I took refuge with my people, and there I realized that without you, without Hell to manage, I didn’t know what to do. And… And I asked myself: but, if I’m no longer the Devil’s Steward, who am I?”

  "That's a big question..." remarked the Devil, both concerned about the answer and impressed by his friend's questioning approach. "Did you eventually find an answer?"

  "Yeah, in a way. Well…" Adramelech nuanced, as if contradicted by the complexity of the answer. "Let's just say it imposed itself. Do you remember what I was doing with the soul dust from Purgatory?"

  "Of course: dragon eggs. I still remember the heated debates you had with Beelzebub when he accused you of depriving his people of the crucial elements necessary for their birth," the Devil recalled.

  “Well, when you left, I figured there were enough dragons, that I didn’t need any more, and since it was a task you’d entrusted to me, your absence made it pointless; so I stopped coming to collect them,” his companion explained. “Then, one day, it must have been not long after Beelzebub seized power, one of my oldest dragons died, and I thought maybe I should go back, at least collect enough to stabilize the dragon population. Except when I arrived at the collection room, surprisingly, it hadn’t overflowed. At first, I thought Beelzebub must have done something, like close it off to keep as many as possible for himself.” And I think he must have done something like that since then, but that wasn't the case here: the dust cloud was, like, normal. And then I heard a cough. Actually, at the bottom of the container, there was a baby on a pile of ashes.

  "A baby?" exclaimed Lucifer, astonished. "But how is that possible? What was it doing there?"

  “She was a little girl. And frankly, I still don’t know anything about her,” Adramelech admitted. “When I entered the room, I mistook her cries for the screams of the damned, so I only realized she was there when soul dust filtered from Purgatory and fell on her. Anyway, I found her, cleaned her up, and brought her home. I started taking care of her while trying to understand how she got there. After a while, I finally gave her a name; it was a real pain without one. I called her Esha.”

  Adramelech paused for a moment, took a deep breath, and then sat down against the railing, facing the interior of the house. The two men found themselves watching Lilith take Abigail by the arm and lead her down a corridor, while, isolated in a corner of the room, Nitha?l and Leonard were talking in such a way that the Devil wondered if it was a heated or passionate conversation. They must have come to an agreement, because the pair eventually left the room as well.

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  “Training dragons is energy-draining; raising a child is even worse. Especially a kid who has the energy of a dragon and grows so fast. In six months, she was already the size of a four-year-old human girl. Yeah, I had to do some research on raising human children because I knew absolutely nothing about it. Belphegor brought me back a few things from Humanity, and honestly? Thank goodness. Anyway, I thought it would be easy, but I ended up having to take afternoon naps to recover. Seriously…” complained Adramelech, whom Lucifer had never seen smile like that. “One afternoon, I was actually sleeping on the sofa when suddenly I heard something break on the first floor of the house.” Except that on the first floor, well, there's my lab and my office.

  "That child is an adventurer," remarked the Devil, amused.

  “You have no idea. I was so intrigued by how Esha’s birth was possible that I recreated these incubators, each with its own experiment on soul dust. And guess what? When I got to the office, the little one had already knocked three over,” the Father of Dragons recounted. “Except that in the fourth one, I’d put a dragon egg, to see if it would alter it. And that was precisely the one Esha had knocked over, like, by taking the egg out. When I arrived, she was holding it, and it was already cracking. The moment I took it from her, I thought it was over, that there was nothing to be gained from this experiment. Well, I was completely wrong: there was another baby inside!” Instead of repeating the mistake I made with Esha, I gave her a name right away: Kora. And if I already didn't think I had enough time for my experiments, with two little girls, forget it. I ended up stopping them to focus on raising them.

  "A vast challenge, it would seem," sympathized Lucifer, recalling his discussions with the owner of the bar where he had met Abigail.

  “You wouldn’t believe it! To tell you the truth, I thought with Esha, I’d already learned everything there was to know—milk, bottles, and all that stuff. Well, maybe it’s because she came out of a dragon egg, but with Kora, I had to raise her like one. Two kids, two completely different ways of doing things,” the fallen dragon testified, the memory of the experience making him wrinkle with fatigue. “Except that, even as they grew up, they had drastically different desires: I had to teach Esha how to use a veritable arsenal of weapons; and Kora, at this point, probably knows almost as much as I do about dragons, she’s studied them so much.”

  "You seem happy, my friend," admitted Lucifer, soothed by their discussion.

  “I am, and like I've never been in billions of years.”

  The fallen one straightened up, dusting himself off before extending his hand to the Devil. Though he considered the outstretched hand for a moment, it was with profound relief that Lucifer grasped it and stood. Bathed in this sweet feeling, he followed his friend to the living room, where he found Abigail and Lilith emerging from the stairs, like two laughing accomplices. When he questioned the reason for their amusement, the Devil had to be satisfied with a playful "That's none of your business," the result of a knowing glance between the two women, leaving him wanting to know more.

  Alas, amidst the general merriment, Leonard returned with furrowed brows and pursed lips, an expression somewhere between anger and perplexity, remaining apart from the group. Concerned, the Devil then approached her and questioned her about her condition, but she didn't even seem to notice him. He had to gently grasp her arm to finally rouse her from her thoughts, and she observed him with incredulous surprise.

  "Is everything alright?" he repeated, uncertainly.

  "Yes, yes... A worrying situation in Kur, but nothing serious in itself," replied Leonard, pulling away from his embrace.

  "Do you know where Nitha?l has gone? You were together, weren't you?" asked the Devil, looking over the witch's shoulder.

  "Huh? Uh, yes, of course. But that's precisely why I sent him to see what was going on."

  Taking him by the arm, she led the Devil to the rest of the group, who had settled peacefully around the fireplace. Without its glass wall, the heat dissipated quickly, and everyone had therefore moved their armchairs closer to enjoy the cozy sensation.

  Lucifer then sat down beside Abigail and watched his three fallen friends begin to talk. Seeing them like this suddenly made the Devil wonder: when was their last informal gathering, a simple day spent together for the sheer pleasure of being together? He didn't count the meetings of the Infernal Council, too serious and bureaucratic to be considered a "good time," but alas, he couldn't find an instance less than a century old where he had been in the company of more than three Infernal Generals. Yet, at the beginning of Hell, the fallen had been inseparable, building and exploring this new land. Over the centuries, alas, each had become trapped in their role, in the routine of their tasks. Oh, of course, they sometimes visited one another, but little by little, they had all drifted apart, and deep down, he couldn't help but feel partly responsible for it.

  Suddenly, in the storm of his thoughts, a gentle hand slipped onto his and pulled him from his torment. Beside him, Abigail smiled kindly, without the slightest idea of how much she had just saved him. Still somewhat lost in the turmoil of his emotions, Lucifer could only smile back. Despite the hardships, the dangers, the injuries, the young woman had not failed him and had helped him find his family. Somewhere deep down, the Devil hoped that his companion's friendship had transcended the material interests of his heart, but, surprisingly, he couldn't bring himself to ask her that simple question.

  Preferring to enjoy the sweetness of the moment, Lucifer took Abigail's hand and sat her down beside him.