Clank.
The pitch blackness lightened to a deep shade of gray. Much like her parents, Brendan stepped out of that grayness. But he showed no signs of recognizing Angela at all. Unseeing and insensible, his skin was a terrible bluish color like the Netherworld’s sun, his upper throat bloody and gaping. He was still dressed like a priest, but a collar of light much like Tileaf’s wrapped above his collarbone, its leash clanking behind him while he walked. On his forehead, a crimson triangle blazed amid the mess of his bangs. “Israfel,” he said, groaning softly.
“What happened?” Angela said, panicked, crushed inside by the sight of him.
Despite all that had taken place, the memories of her brother’s few kindnesses lingered, newly resurrected by their parents’ attempt to drive her mad.
“Why does he look like that? The triangle—”
“Israfel’s symbol. The sign of the Creator Supernal.” Mikel’s voice was thick with disgust. “Your brother sold his soul. Now, he exists solely and eternally as Israfel’s property.”
Eternally.
That’s right, Brendan has a long way to go. This is only the beginning.
But of what, Angela didn’t dare imagine. Already those brief moments in their past were escaping her, and she saw him in the cathedral: the twisted expression of his face and the twisted ugliness in his soul, permanently blotting out whatever kindness remained. Israfel said Brendan’s enchantment had revealed all his hidden flaws and sins, and then made them a hundred times worse. But was Brendan the first person to suffer because of the angel? Perhaps, much like staring into the Grail or opening the Book, obsessing over Israfel had been the cause of countless suicides, deaths, damnations, and sins.
Angela, though, was far from eager to sell her soul.
If anything, she longed for Israfel to offer his own.
“His senses,” Mikel’s tone deepened with pity, “are dulled by his obsession. If he ever reincarnates according to Israfel’s desires, his mind will return. But he will be far from the brother you knew and loved as a child. Now his single heaven and endless hell is to be separated from Israfel, and yet to still be in his service. For him to anger that Supernal to such a degree—he must have overstepped his bounds in a grievous and personal way. What you are seeing is the result of his human foolishness. Despite appearances, your brother was a deeply troubled individual . . .”
Angela should have cried again or shed at least a single tear.
But all she could do was stare. She had nothing else left.
He threw himself to this place without a second thought.
Brendan gazed through her for a second longer. Even though he wasn’t aware of her on a conscious level, he must have still sensed her enter the Netherworld and had been drawn to her presence or aura or whatever had alerted her parents. There were a trillion souls in this place, maybe more, yet he’d managed to find her. Coincidence wasn’t enough to explain that kind of miracle. As if agreeing to the end of their relationship, Brendan trudged past her back into the grayness, soon fading like a washed-out dream. If Angela ever saw him again, this was the last time he’d appear with familiar features and probably any semblance of humanity.
She watched him leave and turned back to the sun’s lifeless light. Slowly, the landscape emerged through the gray haze, and amazingly a bare cliff’s edge took shape beneath her boots. The land below appeared with its barrenness and cracked earth, and out in the immense plain, souls stared up at her, silent and waiting, their hair ruffling in the breeze.
Millions and millions of human souls, gray like their afterlife.
If I’m the Archon, I should know what to do next. But I don’t know a thing.
Where was that inner voice when she needed it most?
Angela let her eyes rest on as many individuals as she could, but the more she tried to think of something to say, the more her mouth went dry. This was the same place she had stood in Tileaf’s mind, only this was the real thing. Whether she was Raziel or someone else, she now stood in the portentous spot, with a sizable chunk of humanity waiting for her to say something. There were so many souls, they stretched to the very horizon.
She glanced back at the path Mikel had taken, and it remained black and inky—a valley of shadows that no light could pierce. Without asking, she sensed that only those who chose torment for their eternity remained in that oppressive pool of gloom. The things she had thought to be branches were more like congealed darkness, extensions forming a natural barrier between this part of the Netherworld and its other half, both vaster than the human mind could comprehend.
There was no sign of the hatch she’d dropped through.
“In the valley of shadows,” Mikel said, “are the souls who do not wish for release from their imprisonment. Unlike these, they will not find freedom in the Nexus, but will stay trapped in this dimension, most likely until it crumbles to nothingness.”
“The Nexus . . .” Angela repeated. “And that’s where all these other souls will go?”
“In time. Some will first choose to fight for the Archon in the eventual battle. But all will leave through Luz, walking up the Ladder to their new resting place, safe from Lucifel’s eternity of silence—unless she succeeds in destroying the Archon herself.” Mikel touched her on the shoulder, but pulled away quickly, her small hands strangely wounded by their contact. Maybe she was responding to the change in Angela’s body. Her heart raced, and the Eye throbbed inside of her palm, begging to stare out at the dead and the blue sun. “Now, it’s time to tell them that you’ve come. To free them and to lead them where even the Supernals could not. Raziel—my father,” Mikel’s face saddened, “would have been happy to see this day.”
“He is,” Angela said, certain.
He has to be.
She looked out at the souls gathered across the expanse of the plain, her stance hardening. This place and these doomed souls were now hers, practically cradled in the cup of her hand.
“I’ve arrived,” she shouted at the top of her lungs, “to free you. It’s time for you to leave this place and go somewhere else. Those who choose to stay . . .
have decided their fate
.” On impulse, she lifted her hand, displaying the Grail for their satisfaction. Some souls sighed, others shrieked in fear, running in the opposite direction. They somehow recognized Lucifel’s former treasure. “This is your choice. Either join me, recognize me, or stay in the darkness for all eternity.”
They were the same words she’d used for her parents.
And they had nearly the same effect.
The sky overhead mirrored the sky over Luz, bubbling and crackling with distant lightning, just like in Tileaf’s mind when Lucifel had turned every soul to ash. Summoned somehow by Angela’s words or feelings, the storm rumbled in on them with horrific speed, its clouds more like living things than air and vapor.
Mikel grabbed Angela’s hand, hissing back pain as she closed it into a fist. “He’s here,” she said, her feathers fluttering in the growing wind. “He’s been waiting.”
T
he earth below split and heaved.
Souls ran to the right and left, some of them tumbling into deep, seemingly endless chasms, screaming as fleshy roots burst upward from the dry rock.
An octopus with skin the color of human flesh could have been crawling out of the ground, but this octopus had a great mass of branches instead of a bulbous head, and upon those branches, a nearly uncountable number of eyes glistening and gazing out over the plain, like leaves in shades of deep green and muddy violet.
The strange tree was growing at tremendous speed, as if Angela’s words had germinated some seed planted long ago beneath the rock. She’d never seen anything so terrible, so alien and wrong, and could barely look away from its trunk of throbbing flesh and its hundreds of branchlike arms.
Then the branches grew more, twisting toward her.
Before Angela could blink again, she stared back into at least fifty different eyes, all of them coiled in front of her face. She bit her tongue, desperate not to scream.
The eyes faded, replaced by the image of an angel with ebony hair, the strands draping over half of his face. Like the tree, his wings were covered with eyes, irises of green and violet gleaming against their black feathers like living jewels. He was much more strongly built than Israfel, with a sharp and severe face.
And you would dare
—his voice pounded through her like a drum—
to take what belongs to me. These souls are in my domain.
Angela glanced around wildly.
Mikel was gone. Vanished.
What happened? Why isn’t she here anymore?
The Archon.
Azrael smiled arrogantly.
Or at least you look like Her. But my loyalty to Raziel ended long ago.
Angela regarded him with an angry face. “And he died,” she said, hardly knowing why she said it or how she knew it, “when you could have helped him. Selfish hedonist. You came here out of greed, to glut yourself.”
Help?
Azrael swept his hair aside, revealing the other half of his face. His eyes were as mismatched as those on his wings, his tree.
If it were not for me, this remnant of Eden would no longer exist. If it weren’t for my so-called selfish hedonism, these souls would have nowhere to rest, however tormented.
“Either way, they’re no longer yours.”
Eden. This used to be the Garden of Eden. Paradise. The birthplace of humanity
.
Now it was simply a pit for the dead.
Azrael’s branches grew more, their fleshy joints bending to snare and choke her. Angela turned and ran back toward the darkness, searching. But Mikel had either abandoned her, or something was happening in Memorial Park. Nina could have been hurt or killed, their connection severed. Now she was alone, and Azrael was gaining on her nightmarishly fast. In seconds the inky black swallowed them, and she was forced to stop, knocked over by a wall of flesh covered in eyes and the shock of him standing in front of her again. The tree must have been his real body, this angelic form a perfect deception.
Now he was going to suffocate her.
Fleshy branches wrapped around her ankles, her legs.
Azrael’s voice seemed to resound throughout the entire Netherworld.
To think that Raziel would punish his Throne, ruin my happiness. How I regret the days when I served him, while he served only himself—
He was almost at her waist and began to squeeze. Angela screamed, her bones close to breaking, her hands pushing at his countless arms while they moved higher.
—as hypocritical and insensitive as the rest of Heaven—
Briefly, his image contorted into Israfel’s, bronze winged but horrendously sneering and warped. Was this how he saw his former Archangel?
—unwilling to recognize me for the power, or the person, that I was.
“And out of all the souls you tasted and imprisoned,” Angela gasped through her pain, “how many could stifle your appetite for any of it? You’re completely deluded,” she said, horrendously angry inside, somehow offended by what felt like blasphemy. “And this Realm doesn’t belong to you. And—
I NO LONGER SEE A NEED FOR YOU IN IT
.”
Azrael recoiled sharply at her words, like she’d injured him with her voice alone. His perfect face hovered above her, wide-eyed and strangely fearful.
Angela showed him the Grail.
The Eye seemed to scorch through him, judgmental and terrible.
He moaned in agony, his branches collapsing, going instantly limp and slithering away from her back to the chasm they’d erupted from. Angela fell to her knees, resting her head on the cushion of her arms, searching for air and the end of the pain. It came after a short time with her muscles still aching terribly, but not enough to keep her from rocking on her heels and rubbing her legs, groaning softly at their soreness.
The new light broke more slowly than the rays over the distant hills.
Clouds whirled overhead in a giant cauldron of vapor.
Gradually, with a majestic slowness, the light at their center began to mysteriously solidify and descend in a helix, one amazing, crystalline step at a time.
Angela had witnessed rainbows forming in the sky, but this was different. Infinitely more beautiful, dazzling, breathtaking. The brightness was so strong, it forced the shadows in the valley to recede, and Angela’s clothes seemed lined with silver, like a cloud in front of the sun. And as the great Stairs continued to descend, each level grew larger and more magnificent than the last, platforms of light that were larger than any building. Below, Azrael’s tree appeared small and insignificant, while souls left his nearly comatose grasp one by one, beginning the steady ascension up to the surface of Luz. Millions rose to freedom, not a few gazing back at Angela in happy confusion, their bodies like a line of gray twining with the helix of the stairs.