Chapter Text
The first thing Vergil heard was laughter, not the laughter of demons, which came with hunger and stupidity, with the crude satisfaction of things that knew only appetite and pain, their voices all teeth and saliva and echo. This was different. This was too bright, skipping through the dark like a coin spun across marble, and Vergil did not turn at once.
Around him, Hell shifted in slow, anatomical breaths. The ground beneath his boots was black stone veined with something red and wet, pulsing faintly, not with life, but with the particular persistence of a thing that had forgotten how to stop. Vergil did not look down at it. He had learned, long ago, that the worst things were not the ones that threatened you, but the ones that simply continued. Above, no sky held shape for long: vaults of bone gave way to cataracts of ash, broken towers leaned at impossible angles, their windows burning with distant, watchful eyes, and somewhere below, something immense dragged chains through the deep. Vergil stood at the edge of a ruined bridge that led nowhere, Yamato resting at his side.
The laughter came again, closer now, a little breathless, a little delighted, as if whoever owned it had been trying very hard not to make an entrance and had failed on purpose.
"Still brooding, I see."
Vergil’s eyes moved first, then his head, the muscles of his neck slow and deliberate as if fighting the gravity of the moment. There, suspended from the broken arch behind him, an intruder dangled with the particular ease of something that had never learned the weight of consequence—knees crooked around stone that should have yielded to entropy a thousand collapses ago, fingers splayed in a pantomime of delight, motley cloth fluttering in a wind that didn't exist in this circle of Hell. The suit looked like a child’s nightmare of a carnival: a clash of purples so bruised they seemed to leak color, reds so arterial they pulsed, blacks so void they bent the light around them into meaner shadows. The costume was a pastiche of every court jester ever murdered in their sleep, sewn together with laughter and spite.
A dozen bells adorned the figure’s wrists, ankles, and horns, each one gleaming with the perfect, lunatic polish of obsession, each one ringing with a crystalline clarity that cut through the low moan of Hell’s machinery in a way that made Vergil’s teeth ache. No wind moved, but the bells chimed anyway, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in discord, always with the sly insistence of a private joke you were too sober to understand. The Jester’s hands waved slowly through the air, as if conducting a symphony only he could hear, and every movement sent threads of sound winding into the landscape, teasing the architecture of Hell into subtle dance.
His face, if you could call it a face, was painted white as bone, jaw inked in a permanent rack of teeth, lips stretched in a grin so exaggerated it seemed to threaten his own head with decapitation. The eyes were worse: black, depthless, glimmering with the wet glee of a creature whose only law was to delight in the undoing of rules. The mouth moved, but the smile never shifted, puppet-like, as he spoke.
Vergil recognized the type immediately: a lesser demon who had learned the currency of attention, who lived and thrived not on violence, though he could do violence, but on reaction, on the quality of fear or rage or confusion he could stir in whatever audience he found. The Jester’s entire existence was a dare: dare you to laugh, dare you to scream, dare you to try to ignore me, because you can’t.
The Jester blinked at him, swinging slightly from his perch. His tongue darted out like a lizard’s, wetting the black lips, leaving a trail that gleamed and then vanished. He stared down at Vergil, head cocked, pupils dilated with a child’s anticipation, waiting for the present to be unwrapped. Somewhere in the depths of the arch, the stone groaned, but the Jester never flinched, only dangled and spun and radiated mockery.
Vergil stared.
The silence that followed would have frightened a wiser thing, but the Jester only grinned wider. "Oh, don't look so sour, bluebird. You'll wrinkle."
Vergil turned away again. "Speak while you still have a tongue."
The Jester gave a wounded gasp and dropped from the arch, twisting in midair with obscene grace to land in a crouch, one hand pressed dramatically to his chest, the other thrown outward as though receiving applause from an invisible court. "Such manners. Such warmth. Truly, the lost son of Sparda has grown into a prince of conversation."
Vergil's expression did not change.
The Jester rocked on his heels. "No? Nothing? Not even a twitch? Not even a tiny little murder-face?" He pinched his fingers together before one eye. "You used to be more fun when you were bleeding."
Yamato whispered half an inch from its sheath, the sound very soft, and the Jester stopped moving. For one perfect moment, the bells at his wrists went still. Vergil looked at him then-not with anger, which would have been too generous, but with the flat, precise contempt of a blade deciding where flesh ended and bone began.
"You have mistaken survival for permission."
The Jester's grin returned by degrees, first one corner, then the other. "Ah. There he is."
Vergil drew Yamato. The blade came free without flourish, without threat, without even haste, blue light bleeding thinly along its edge, cold enough to make the air recoil. The bridge beneath them groaned as if remembering a wound. The Jester lifted both hands. "Careful, careful. Kill the messenger too early, and you never hear the punchline."
"I dislike jokes."
"Oh, I know." The Jester leaned forward, eyes glittering. "That is what makes you the joke."
Vergil moved. He moved with the speed of memory: not a flash or a blur, but the instant, simultaneous knowing of what had already happened to you and what you were about to do. One moment, he stood ten paces away, half a conversation and several lifetimes removed from the Jester; the next, he had crossed the impossible space between them, and Yamato’s cold blue edge was pressed precisely into the hollow beneath the Jester’s chin. The sword never trembled. It simply existed there, an immutable instruction. The Jester’s painted throat quivered against the blade, the tight skin dimpled by the pressure, and for the first time, the motley thing’s glee stuttered into a more complicated shape.
In that close proximity, even Hell’s riotous background faded. The bridge, the breathing stone, the cicada-hum of infernal watchers—none of it mattered. There was just Vergil’s immaculate stillness and the Jester’s bright, chemical reek, his sinew and silk and crumbling greasepaint. Blue-white from the sword’s edge cast a thin, surgical line up the center of the Jester’s face, catching in the cracks of his hideous smile.
If the Jester felt fear, he did not know what to do with it. His eyes crossed, fascinated, at the blade’s tip, and a thin line of oily blood welled along the contact point. Bells inside him rattled, uncertain for the first time.
Vergil’s voice, when it came, was as cold as the sword and twice as sharp. “Choose your next words with diligence.” He leaned infinitesimally closer, and the effect was as if the gravity in Hell itself had shifted, focusing every motion, every possible violence, onto a single locus: the space between the blade and the Jester’s pulsing carotid.
The Jester went very, very still. Then, slowly, delightedly, he smiled against the blade.
"Your sister is alive."
The world did not pause. Hell had no mercy for revelation-the red veins beneath the black stone kept pulsing, something screamed far away and was answered by something worse, ash drifted down in its slow, indifferent curtain. None of it stopped. None of it cared. Vergil did not move. The blade stayed. His grip did not tighten. His face did not change. But something behind his eyes went absolutely, catastrophically still-the stillness of a man standing at the edge of something he had spent years convincing himself was not there.
The Jester felt it before he saw it. His bells went quiet on their own.
"Oh," he breathed, and his voice softened into something almost reverent with cruelty. "There it is."
Vergil did not speak. The Jester tilted his chin, letting the edge press a thin line into his painted skin. "You didn't know."
Yamato cut him, not deeply, just enough that black blood welled under the blade and slid down the pale column of his throat. The Jester shivered. "Mm. I stand corrected. You suspected, perhaps. Once. A long time ago..." His eyes found Vergil's and held them with the patience of something that fed on exactly this. "...Before you did what practical men do with useless grief."
Vergil's voice was quiet. "Dead things do not return because a fool names them."
"But living things hide."
The words settled between them. Vergil's stare became very still, and the Jester's grin trembled with pleasure. "There it is again. That little silence. Do you know, it is almost sweet? All that discipline, all that pride, and still-" He tapped one long finger against his temple. "A door opens."
Vergil pressed the blade harder. "Where?"
"Not even a 'who'? Not even a 'how'? My, my." The Jester's eyes widened with mock innocence. "You accept it quickly for a man who buried her."
The cut at his throat deepened. The Jester laughed, breathless and sharp. "Yes. Yes, that one hurt."
Vergil's face remained carved from glacial stone, the only sign of change in him a narrowing at the corner of his eye, a tic so minute that even the predatory things of Hell might have missed it. The air itself was less forgiving; pressure built in a way that made the bridge's mortar shriek, invisible chill eating the light from Yamato until its blue edge was a pale wound in the dark. He said nothing. He didn't have to. The world responded for him, drawing in around his posture, the shadows crowding hungrily at his flanks, as Hell itself waited for a verdict.
The Jester cocked his head, sensing the shift, and responded as all lesser demons do when threatened: with more of whatever had gotten them this far.
"I buried nothing," Vergil said, his voice cutting through the mirth like a knife through taut skin. The words lingered in the air, sharp and unyielding, as if they were the final decree of a judge in a court long forgotten.
The Jester faltered for a heartbeat, the gleeful mask slipping just enough to reveal something raw beneath-an instinctive fear, perhaps. He tilted his head, the bells around his wrists chiming softly, a dissonant symphony of uncertainty. "Oh, but you did," he purred, each syllable dripping with malice. "You buried her in the silence of your own making, left her to rot while you played the noble warrior."
Vergil’s grip on Yamato tightened imperceptibly, the blade’s edge biting deeper into the Jester’s skin, drawing forth a bead of dark blood that mingled with the acrid air. "Speak of her again," he warned, voice low and frigid, "and I will carve the truth from your throat."
The Jester’s smile returned, though it was now tinged with an unsettling edge, a predatory glint that danced in his eyes. "Ah, but truth is a slippery thing, dear Vergil. You think you wield it, yet it slips through your fingers like ash. Your sister is alive, hiding in shadows darker than these."
The weight of the words settled heavily between them, a palpable tension that made the very stones beneath their feet tremble. Vergil remained unmoving, a statue carved from ice, the flicker of doubt igniting within him like a distant flame. "Where?" he demanded, the word emerging like a command, laced with the urgency of a man on the brink of discovery.
The Jester leaned closer, the sickly sweetness of his breath mingling with the cold air. "Ah, but that is the question, isn’t it? A game of hide and seek, with you as the seeker. But tell me, dear Vergil, what will you do when you find her? Will you bury her again?"
The mocking tone ignited a fire in Vergil's chest, fury and desperation intertwining. He pressed the blade harder still, a reminder of the stakes, the threat of violence hanging like a guillotine above them. "I will not lose her again."
The Jester chuckled, the sound dark and hollow, resonating with the echoes of countless lost souls. "Then let us play, Vergil. Let us dance on the edge of truth and lies, and see who falls first. No?" The Jester's voice dropped, not in volume but in timbre, sliding between registers, threading itself around the syllables like a noose. "The red one kept sniffing at doorways. Pathetic, really. Every rumor, every ash mark, every girl with pale hair glimpsed at the wrong hour in the wrong city. He chased shadows until even the shadows got bored with him. I watched," the Jester crooned, drawing the word out like a silk ribbon, "Oh, how I watched. He cut a lovely figure in his mourning, your brother. Always looking for a ghost, always missing the living. But you-"
He leaned forward, his own reflection caught and shredded in the blue shine of Yamato’s blade. "You were easier. You buried her so neatly. No prayers, no mourning, just that little trick you do with thoughts you don't like. You made her a story. A footnote. Isn't that right, Vergil?"
The name hit the air with the weight of an accusation and the intimacy of a lover’s whisper. The bridge shuddered beneath them, a long, slow exhale of old stone, as if Hell itself recognized the trespass.
Vergil let the silence flower. He let it become enormous, a suffocating, growing thing. When he finally moved, it was with such absolute control that the transition appeared inevitable, a law of nature: Yamato flashed, a sweep impossible to follow, a line drawn so perfectly that for a fraction of a second it didn't seem like anything had moved at all.
The Jester split in two. Not just the body, certainly, and in a way that defied all meat and bone, separating not at the seam but along a spiral, as if the body had been unwound from the inside out, but the voice, the presence, the very soul of the thing. Both halves hung in the air, still grinning, still perfectly alive, if 'alive' could be said to apply. One half fell to the stones, the other stuck for an instant to the arch’s lip, fingers still clinging, bells still chiming.
The laughter doubled. It echoed along the bridge, up and down, through the arches, in and out of the wounds in the world. For a moment, it was beautiful, a kind of crystalline music, and then it turned ugly: two voices, then four, then eight, each one pitched slightly off, each one mocking the last. The severed halves of the Jester blurred and ran, melting into a hissing, oily smoke that left stains where it touched the stone, stains that wriggled and twisted as if something hungry had been loosed into the cracks.
Vergil remained motionless, blade extended, his focus unbroken. The only sign that anything had changed was the very faint shimmer along Yamato’s edge, the tiniest rime of black blood that evaporated even as it appeared. He waited. He did not indulge the urge to look around, to confirm the kill, to hunt for the trick that would inevitably follow.
The laughter returned, this time above and behind, a child’s giggle smothered in velvet. "Temper, temper!"
Vergil turned. The Jester reappeared sitting on the ruined parapet, one leg crossed over the other, chin propped in his hand as if they were discussing weather over tea. The wound at his throat remained, black and glistening. Vergil did not pursue. That, more than the strike, made the Jester's grin brighten.
"You want the rest."
Vergil's jaw set almost imperceptibly.
The Jester clapped softly. "Oh, excellent. A negotiation. I do adore a negotiation with men who pretend they cannot be bought."
"I will not ask twice."
"You have not asked once. That's your problem." The Jester leaned forward. "You command. You cut. You walk through worlds as if obedience is a natural law. But this?" He tapped his own lips. "This requires appetite."
Vergil's eyes narrowed. "Where is she?"
The Jester sighed in theatrical disappointment. "Better. Still stiff. But better."
Vergil lifted Yamato again, but the Jester wagged a finger. "Ah-ah. Listen first. Stab later. You will like this part."
"I doubt that."
"Oh, you will hate it. Which is very nearly the same thing."
The ruined bridge groaned beneath them, and beyond it, a vast gate of fused bone opened and closed in the distance like a mouth dreaming of speech. Something moved inside it that had no outline. Red light passed over Vergil's face, then vanished, leaving him colder than before. The Jester's voice dropped to a register that did not belong to anything with a throat.
"Little Korora."
The name entered him like a blade finding an old wound it had made itself. Vergil did not move. He did not breathe. The world continued anyway, the gate opened and closed, the red light pulsed, Hell went on being Hell, and somewhere beneath the iron architecture of his composure, something that had been sealed for twenty years turned over in the dark, blind and searching, the way a buried thing moves when it hears its name called from above. He crushed it before it could surface. The Jester watched him do it and smiled wider for the effort.
"She kept it, you know. Mostly. Humans are sentimental about names. They put them on papers, badges, doors, and files. They say a thing often enough and pretend it becomes ordinary." His grin showed all his teeth, too many, arranged wrong. "But blood is such a rude archivist."
Vergil's fingers tightened around Yamato until the grip was the only warm thing left. "She is on Earth."
"Ding, ding, ding."
"Where?"
The Jester tilted his head. "You really do want to skip to the end. No savoring. No grief. No 'my beloved sister, torn from me in youth, how cruelly fate has treated us.'"
Vergil's gaze cut through him. "She was a child."
The Jester's grin softened into something more grotesque than mockery. "So were you."
For the first time, silence answered him fully. Hell breathed. Vergil stood motionless, but something old cracked open behind his eyes, not memory in any gentle sense, because memory, for Vergil, came like an ambush: fire against windows, his mother's voice, Dante screaming somewhere beyond smoke, a small hand slipping from his. No. Not slipping. Taken. Or had he run first? The thought clawed at the surface before the iron of his will drove it back under.
The Jester's face split into something that no longer resembled a grin-too wide, too still, the expression of a thing that had learned joy from a diagram. He descended from the parapet one slow step at a time, head tilted, bells silent for once, as if even they understood this required reverence. "Ah," he breathed. " There it is. The house. The fire. The little girl swallowed right up." He stopped just outside Yamato's reach, and his voice dropped to the register of a lullaby sung in an empty room. "Did she call your name, I wonder? At the end? Did she think you were coming?"
The air split. Yamato moved before thought did, before will, before discipline, before anything Vergil had spent twenty years constructing, and the cut opened across the Jester's face from brow to jaw, splitting paint and flesh and the grin down its center, black blood sheeting between his fingers as he crashed back into the parapet. Vergil crossed the distance in one step and stood over him, blade leveled, and his voice when it came was not cold. It was something worse than cold. "You will not speak of that night."
The Jester panted once. Then he laughed through the blood. "Oh, but that is the only night any of you ever speak of. You simply do it badly."
Vergil's blade hovered. The Jester lowered his hand, his face knitting itself together with a wet, horrible sound, but the grin returned crooked. "Dante never stopped looking."
The Jester’s laughter rippled across the stone, cruel and precise. Then, in the space of a heartbeat, he was gone, only a faint distortion of light where he’d stood. Vergil felt the shift in the air, as if the corridor itself braced for a storm.
He pivoted, Yamato raised, but the Jester reappeared on a narrow ledge above, one knee drawn up, eyes glinting with wicked delight. “Did you expect to find me waiting?” His voice slithered down like smoke.
Vergil stepped forward, each footfall measured. The Jester vanished again, laughter trailing like a wound in the silence. He materialized at the far end of the hall, a flash of motley against gray stone.
Vergil’s sword moved in a slow arc toward the shifting shadows. The Jester crouched on a crumbling pillar, surveying him with keen amusement. “You cannot outrun what forged you,” he purred. “A blade without its maker is only steel.”
Vergil’s grip tightened. He spoke evenly: “I answer only to my own will.”
The Jester dropped lightly to the floor, appearing inches from Vergil’s boots. He inclined his head, hands clasped behind him as if in courtly respect. “Yet every stroke you strike bleeds from that night. She was torn from you, and in that rupture, so too was your path.”
A flicker of doubt passed through Vergil’s stance, so slight it might have been imagined. The Jester leaned in, voice low. “Shut out the past, and she slips further into the dark you’ve chosen.”
Silence stretched. Yamato’s blade gleamed without a whisper.
Vergil said nothing.
"She is clever, your sister. Quieter than the red one. Less theatrical than you, though that is hardly difficult. She learned the human world well. Its doors. Its records. Its little uniforms of authority." He paused, delighted. "A federal agent. Can you imagine?"
Vergil's face remained unreadable, but the words entered: federal agent, human authority, a life arranged under fluorescent lights and mortal law, a desk, a weapon, a badge. Korora among humans. Korora pretending to be one.
The Jester laughed softly. "Sparda's daughter playing house with mortals."
Vergil's gaze snapped to him, and the air cracked. This time, the Jester stepped back-only one step, but he stepped back.
"Careful," he said lightly. "That was almost feeling."
Vergil's voice dropped. "She knows Dante is searching."
"Oh, yes."
"And she misleads him."
"Again and again. Like a little maze-maker." The Jester wiggled his fingers. "A false witness here. A missing report there. A sighting that sends him six states in the wrong direction. The poor red dog keeps following the scent, and she keeps washing the road clean."
Vergil's mouth tightened. "Why?"
The Jester's expression brightened. "There. That is the question."
Vergil said nothing.
The Jester leaned closer. "Perhaps she hates you." The words hung there, sweet and poisoned. "Perhaps she remembers being left. Perhaps she remembers two brothers and a burning house and the shape of absence so well that she made a religion of never being found."
Vergil's grip on Yamato remained steady as the Jester circled him. "Or perhaps she knows something. Perhaps she knows that when children of Sparda gather, old locks begin to tremble. Old mouths open. Old masters wake."
Vergil turned with him, slow and controlled. "You were sent."
The Jester's grin flickered-only for a moment, but enough. Vergil's eyes sharpened. "You are not here for amusement."
"Oh, I am always here for amusement. It is my purest quality."
"You are bait."
The Jester placed a hand over his heart. "Wounded."
"For whom?"
"Does it matter?" The Jester's voice slipped into silk. "A name. A door. A sister. You will come. The red one will come. She will run, of course, because little lost things grow teeth in the dark, but eventually…" He spread his hands. "Family reunion."
Vergil stared at him-cold, measured, unmoved to anyone stupid enough to believe the surface of things. "You want all three of us together," Vergil said.
"Want is such a vulgar word."
"Need, then."
The Jester's eyes glittered. Vergil took one step forward, and the ground split beneath his boot. "Who does?"
The Jester's grin began to shake at the edges, not with fear alone, but with delight so intense it resembled terror. "Wouldn't you rather ask where she is?"
"No."
That stopped him. For the first time, the Jester's face changed. Vergil lifted Yamato, the point aimed at the hollow of the creature's throat. "You have given me enough to find her."
The Jester's smile returned too quickly. "Have I?"
"Yes."
"You are very confident for a man whose sister has evaded Dante for years."
"Dante is loud."
The Jester barked out a laugh. "Oh, that is cruel. True, but cruel."
Vergil's expression did not shift. "She anticipated him."
"And you think she will not anticipate you?"
"I know she will."
The Jester blinked. Vergil's voice became quieter. "That is why I will not search as he searched."
For a moment, only Hell answered. The bridge pulsed beneath them, its veined stone exhaling sulfur and the lashings of a heat that never cooled. Ash drifted over Yamato, curling in slow spirals, but each fleck vanished before it could touch the blade, atomized by the force of Vergil's poise-a discipline so total it wiped even the memory of decay from the air. The Jester blinked, as if all this, the bridge, the firelight, the two of them poised at the roof of damnation, had suddenly become very real.
Then the Jester's eyes went wide, wider than madness alone could manage, and a hunger beyond appetite flashed across his painted face. "Oh," he whispered, the sound so low it barely escaped his lips. "You are going to hurt him."
Vergil said nothing. His silence was a machinery, a mechanism that wound up in the dark behind his eyes until it threatened to tear the world. His gaze was pale, pitiless, and absolutely still, as if even blinking would be a form of weakness. When he spoke, the voice had shed all mortal inflection, become a cold dictum: "I am going to find her."
The Jester's lips pursed in a mockery of a kiss, then split into a full, delighted crescent. "How noble," he crooned, and the word was not a compliment but the promise of a trap.
"Nobility is irrelevant," Vergil replied.
The Jester giggled once, sharp, bright, a child's hiccup at the funeral. "Family, then?"
Vergil let the question dangle. The Jester's smile grew barbed, and his feet moved in a jittery, involuntary dance atop the bridge's crumbling edge. "Careful, Vergil. Dead sisters are obedient. They stay where you put them. Living ones ask questions."
Vergil's chin lifted, but that was all. The smallest sign of irritation in him was like a tremor at the base of a cliff, barely perceptible, but the harbinger of something catastrophic. The Jester, emboldened, edged closer on tiptoe, as if drawn by the gravity of the wound he'd named.
"What will you tell her, I wonder?" the Jester murmured, lips almost brushing Vergil's ear. "That you searched? That you mourned? That power was easier because grief had no blade? That you left one ghost behind and called it discipline?"
The line stung, and for one heartbeat, one precise, clockwork tick, Vergil's grip on Yamato loosened. The Jester saw it, seized it, and pressed forward. "You are the discipline. Dante, the spectacle. But she-ah, she was always the question. The piece you never solved. She is not waiting to be rescued, Vergil. She is only waiting for you to admit you lost her."
Vergil's answer was so sharp it had no edge: "I will tell her nothing she does not ask."
The Jester recoiled, mask flickering. In that instant, the illusion of omniscience cracked; something shivered behind the paint, something frightened. He masked it with a theatrical spin, away from Yamato's reach, hands out wide. "Well. How very restrained. How very tragic. How very you."
He bowed, deep and low, sweeping his patched cap across the stone, bells chiming with the weight of a hundred tiny funerals. "Then go, son of Sparda. Crawl back to Earth. Find the sister who hid from one brother and was buried by the other," he intoned, voice echoing into the sulfur. "Knock on her little human door. See whether she opens it."
Vergil slid Yamato home with a sound like the closing of a vault. The Jester, still on one knee, looked up, eyes glassy in the firelight. "Leaving so soon?" he ventured, half-hopeful, half-dreading.
Vergil turned toward the mouth of the broken bridge, where the dark bent around him in a subtle tremor, as if the world itself was acknowledging his passage. His steps were slow, deliberate, but nothing in his posture suggested retreat.
Behind him, the Jester called out, sweet and bright: "Do give Korora my regards." His voice rang off the hellstone, lingering like perfume.
Vergil halted.
The Jester's smile slid wide, too wide, his joy a little too frantic. "And Dante too, when he realizes you knew."
For a long moment, the old air of Hell seemed to press hard against Vergil's back, a wind made of knives, of memory, of all the things Hell took from children and spat back as prophecy. He did not flinch. Instead, he looked back over his shoulder, his eyes unblinking and his words cut from the bone:
"The next time you use her name," Vergil said, "I will remove it from your mouth."
The Jester swallowed, the motion grotesque as a puppet learning fear. Vergil walked on, the darkness folding neatly around him like a closing door.
Only when the echo of his footsteps fully vanished did the Jester allow himself to breathe again. He shivered, uncertain if the tremor was joy or terror, and pressed a hand over the seam of his painted jaw as if reassuring himself it was still there.
Then, very softly, he began to laugh, a sound not triumphant but fragile, thin as spider silk, bordering on prayer. The laughter wound up and up, echoing through the charred vaults of Hell, until the Jester's own voice sounded alien to him, the refrain of a creature who had glimpsed the future and found even his jokes unequal to the task.
"Oh," he whispered, rocking gently in place, "this is going to be beautiful."