# # #
Chrymos was nineteen when the citywide alarums sounded. The Darke Warriors had finally discovered Atlantis, despite the protective enchantments put in place by the Elders and despite the prophetic powers of the angel Jesse. Now the island city was under attack, as the Darke Warriors, led by the thunder demon Hurakan, pounded its coast with tidal wave after gigantic tidal wave. Chrymos should have been safely housed in one of the city’s shelters but her young brother was missing and she went searching for him.
The tidal waves swept her far out to the unforgiving ocean. She might have made it back to shore safely—but her seven-year-old brother, also swept away, cried out for her help. But before she could reach him, she was snatched out of the sea by the Darke Warrior Ezequeel.
Chrymos was still conscious when Ezequeel took her to the cavern at Alepotrypa, the single earthly entrance to the otherworld of Hades. She experienced every agonizing moment as her body was ripped into its microscopic components and translated across the abyss to Hades.
# # #
Chrymos was nineteen when her name was stripped from her and she was given the designation Prisoner Number Eleven, the seven-hundred-and-eleventh Outcast Angel to be imprisoned in the heinous underworld that was Hades.
# # #
Eleven was nineteen—and then a hundred and nineteen—and then one thousand, three thousand, five thousand and nineteen—as the most sadistic of Lucifer’s lieutenants, Nekhbet, tortured her and conducted countless experiments on her, trying to force her to reveal the location of the new Outcast Angels Sanctuary.
# # #
Eleven was seven thousand and nineteen and had been imprisoned in solitude in a tiny cavern for decades. At first she called out, she begged, she screamed, she whimpered but no-one came. Her only sustenance was moisture and moss from the wall of the cave, which lay in the deepest underground region of Hades. As far as Eleven knew, she was the only living being in the netherworld. All others there had died at least once and had been sent to Hades if they had not accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior or if they were angels or demons who had rebelled. Consequently, Eleven was the only prisoner in Hades who required any energy to keep her still-mortal body alive. Normally, she consumed solar radiation, but in Hades she was already so very, very far from the sun. In her new prison, in a deep underground cavern and screened from even those feeble rays by demonic protections, that energy source was denied her.
Eleven resisted and resisted and resisted, until finally her mortal body was minutes from death. Only then, with her life ebbing away, did Eleven allow herself to reach out and draw energy from the tormented human spirits that were also trapped in Hades. Eleven took just the bare minimum, enough to restore her body for a few days—but as she absorbed even that small amount of energy, she could feel the vampiric thirst building in her and knew that next time she would be more easily driven to feed on the helpless slaves around her.
The following day, Eleven was freed from her isolation and separation from solar energy. Nothing was said, then or ever, but Eleven knew that she had failed, had shown herself to be no better than her demon captors. She had also developed a deep and lasting fear of confinement that she would continue to feel even when her conscious memory was lost.
# # #
Eleven was eight thousand, six hundred and eighty-one when the angel Machkiel was paraded through Hades. As an outcast, Machkiel was resurrected in the netherworld rather than in Heaven when his body died. He was the first angel to be consigned to Hades in a very long time and the demons celebrated loud and long.
That was the exact moment when Eleven first resolved to escape. If I don’t get out of here while my body is still alive, she realized, one day they will kill me and then I will be completely in their power.
From that day forward, Eleven exercised in her small cell whenever she could, training her muscles and her reflexes. The demons guarding her would peer in to her cell, laugh, and make fun of her. “Go ahead and fatten yourself up for the kill, Eleven, you’re never going to get out of here.”
It took more than thirteen hundred years, but when her opportunity came, Eleven was ready.
# # #
Eleven was ten thousand and nineteen or thereabouts when the day came that the demons were distracted, rejoicing over their successful assassination of Pope Leo XI.
After millennia of imprisonment, Eleven made a daring escape from Hades and slipped through the portal to Alepotrypa.
She did not escape unnoticed. She found herself pursued by hundreds of demons and was eventually struck by fireballs that incinerated her wings and sent her plummeting into the sea far below.
Eleven was still conscious, though barely, when several demons dragged her out of the water and tossed her battered body onto the ground in front of her tormentor, Nekhbet.
Eleven could once again recall the amused look on Nekhbet’s face as the Darke Warrior looked down at her where she lay. And in a daze, before the pain from her injuries drove her unconscious, she heard Nekhbet’s final words to her. “Since your escape from Hades, your possibilities have been transformed. Now, you might become the one who actually triggers the Lost War. Wouldn’t that be spectacular?”
Eleven lay on the ground while Nekhbet examined her closely. “Yes,” said the Darke Warrior at last, “I believe it’s worth taking the risk. Eleven my dear, you’re finally going to be working for us. But first, we need to rid you of your memories. Let’s go and visit the Academy.”
# # #
Eleven had struggled, fought, and kicked as the men from the Academy tried to force her to drink some sort of liquid. Her very last recovered memory was of a man she now recognized as Father Carracci, hitting her over the head with a stout piece of wood.
# # #
And then she had woken up in Florence, with all knowledge of her past and her identity stripped from her.
# # #
Chrymos turned to Adric, not sure what to say to him now that she knew what she really was, only to find him whispering a few words to her in the secret Mystikó spell-language—which, thanks to the Exousía potion, she now understood. He said, “
Then Adric reached out and removed the pathgem band from her wrist.
ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FOUR
Nowhen
Chrymos couldn’t move, couldn’t talk—but her heart could still break. Even though she knew Adric couldn’t possibly hear her thoughts, she still tried to mind-call him.
To her surprise, Adric reacted as if he could actually hear her—and he smiled, but it was a twisted, evil caricature of his normal smile.
And then, without warning, Adric flickered. His whole body transformed, his features stretching and melting, his hair shrinking into itself and changing color.
If Chrymos could have gasped, she would have done so, for the person emerging in front of her was not Adric—it was Ruben.
“Hello, sis,” said Ruben. “How nice that you finally know who you are. Remember me yet?”
ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FIVE
Villa belonging to Phaon, 4 miles outside Rome, ante diem quintum Idus Iunias (June 9) 68 AD
It had been a bad day for the man whose birth name was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. His fourteen-year reign as Emperor Nero had just come to an inglorious end.
A messenger had arrived at Phaon’s villa two hours earlier, bearing the news that the Roman Council had declared Nero to be a public enemy and that armed men were being dispatched to seize the emperor and take him to the Forum for execution. The report was premature—the directors were still debating the action—but not by much.
Nero, hiding out in a villa outside Rome that belonged to his freedman servant Phaon, quickly moved from denial to despair. He paced from room to room, muttering, “What an artist dies in me”
and threatening to take his own life.
“Self-obsessed to the last,” whispered Phaon to Nero’s private secretary, Epaphroditos. “It never occurs to him to wonder why so many want him gone.”
Epaphroditos never had a chance to reply, because at that moment the demon Ezequeel appeared out of nowhere, the deadly stench of brimstone leeching out of his every pore. Nero—the most powerful man in the Roman Empire, the man whose merest whim could mean death for any of his millions of citizens—threw himself to the floor and begged for his life.
“Has Orcus himself sent you to take me to the netherworld? Mercy, oh mercy, I beg you.”
Ezequeel looked down unimpressed at the blond, blue-eyed wretch quaking at his feet. This is the human that Hurakan wants to install as leader of a new Roman Empire? What a worm. Still, Ezequeel had his orders. Better act nice.
“Hail Caesar!” Hurakan said not to say any more until the human responds.
Nero was momentarily perplexed, and then his imperial instinct reasserted itself. He stood up again and tried to stare at the apparition without shaking. Swallowing hard, he spoke in a quavering voice. “What do you want? Why are you here? Speak or be gone.”
Ezequeel managed to sound momentarily obsequious. “I come to rescue you, mighty emperor—to save you from those who would mean you harm this very day.”
Nero, never one to miss an opportunity, brightened at the thought. “You offer allegiance to your emperor?”
“Oh yes,” said Ezequeel, struggling not to laugh. “But we must be gone from here at once, your enemies are nearly upon you.”
With that pronouncement, the Darke Warrior seized the emperor by the shoulder and then stretched out a finger to the blue jewel that Ezequeel wore on a band around his wrist. Ezequeel muttered an incantation and the pair, nervous emperor and triumphant demon, began to fade from sight.
Moments before he vanished, Nero managed to cry out one last word to Epaphroditos: “Reddam.”
Before nightfall, news of Nero’s disappearance and that last word, Nero’s final promise, “I will return”, had echoed across half of Rome. By the next full moon, it was established legend through the length and breadth of the Roman Empire that Nero would be back. A few cheered—but most shivered in fear.
ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX
Nowhen
For Chrymos, it was the final shock. Ruben was her brother. Like her, he was also an Outcast Angel born in exile. Like her, he had been washed out to sea when Atlantis fell. The last time she remembered seeing him, in the surging waters, he had been just seven. Now, many thousands of years later, he looked like a young man in his twenties—but Chrymos could still recognize the features of the young child she had adored as they grew up together.
“Yes, Chrymos, it’s me,” said Ruben, “and I’ve known who you were all along. The Academy didn’t need to wipe my memories like they did yours—I was happy to join them.”
“Hello?” said Ruben, “I know you’re in the middle of recovering your memory and all that, but have you taken a look at yourself lately? We’re angels, but we have no powers because we were born outside heaven. All we can do is fly—but if we’re discovered, the humans will do their best to try to kill us. Our parents rebelled, we didn’t, but we’re still stuck, banished to a single miserable planetary system, powerless, hiding from virtually everyone. As the humans say, ‘the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation’. Lucky us. Thankfully, the pathgem can change all that.”
“You’ll see, in a few—seconds? Minutes? How does anyone tell time in a place like Nowhen anyway?”
“What you don’t know—because most angels never knew—is how to use the pathgem. Only Ezequeel knew, because when he was in Heaven the pathgem was his responsibility. Of course, after the Rebellion he told Nekhbet how it actually worked—and she told me, so that I could use it if you managed to find it.” As he explained, Ruben was gazing around at the thickly-forested area in which they found themselves. He chose a towering tree with a good view of the clearing and guided Chrymos behind its mighty trunk, whispering the words that let him control her movements.
Then he leaned back on a neighboring tree-trunk and looked at Chrymos. “I’m sure you have plenty of questions, dear sister. We have a little time, so ask away.”
“Recently? Oh, off assassinating the French king,” replied Ruben, giving an unpleasant grin. “Carracci thought he forced me to do it, using one of his spells. The spell didn’t actually work on me—the Darke Warriors gave me what I needed to protect myself from those sorts of spells—but I went along with his plan, simply to see what would happen. I didn’t speak when Carracci killed Luca, either—although I thought it was a bit foolish, he should have forced Luca to transmute large quantities of gold before he threw him into the ravine.”
“I followed you, of course. My camouflage capabilities allowed me to blend into the background. You had a couple of close calls, didn’t you, sis? I must admit, my heart was in my mouth for a while there—all the trouble I went to, only for you to stuff it up.” He smiled unpleasantly. “Thankfully, you came through—persistence runs in the family, I suppose.”
“I stole some of Odaldi’s elixir. I bet he was furious, right?”
“That was easy—I waited until you were out of sight and then I flew through the empty passages. I’m an angel, remember?”
With an enabling thought, Ruben summoned his wings. Chrymos gasped—Ruben’s wings were still feathered but they had turned a dark grey, reflecting the changes in his heart. Ruben flew up into the Nowhen sky, gawping like a tourist, before reluctantly flying down to land near Chrymos.
“I never ever thought I’d get to see this place. Nowhen—it’s awesome. You should see it from up there—oh, yes, you can’t move, I forgot, sorry about that.” Another unpleasant smirk.
“Because they’re not Academy spells—they’re Darke Warrior spells. How could any mere human spells work, whether here or back on Earth, without angelic or demonic powers behind them?”
“Also easy. They were in fact former students who were, let’s say, ‘surplus to the Academy’s needs’. I used an appropriate spell to freeze them in place.”
Ruben decided he’d given enough explanations. “Honestly, Chrymos, you need to concentrate on getting your mind back together, not chatting with me. Here, this’ll help.”
Ruben cast another spell. “
He shrugged. “Sorry. We’re about to have visitors—in particular, Ezequeel. We just escaped from him of course but I imagine you also remember him from the fall of Atlantis and from Hades, right? I can’t have you spraying your thoughts around like a water-fountain—that would interfere with my plans.”
He looked over at Chrymos and saw the obvious question in her eyes.
“How do I know that Ezequeel is coming soon? Before he was killed in his battle with Machkiel, he came here with a very special guest, the true Roman emperor, Nero. Ezequeel embedded this—Time? Place? Sorry, I don’t have an adequate description for Nowhen. Anyway, Ezequeel mentally embedded this destination into the pathgem because he planned to come back to the very same moment. When I chose our own destination, I set it for just before Ez
equeel’s next arrival here, which was his previous visit—whatever ‘just before’ and ‘previous’ mean in this crazy place.”
Time passed and then out of the corner of her eye Chrymos noticed a disturbance in the air in the clearing, a shimmering where two shapes seemed to fade into existence. The shapes gradually became two people. One was the horrific Darke Warrior Ezequeel, and he was indeed wearing the pathgem. His companion appeared to be a human in his thirties, short curly blond hair, dressed in a simple Roman tunic.
Ezequeel released his grip on the human, took a couple of paces back, and bowed low. “Mighty Emperor, I must go now to prepare for your glorious homecoming. I will be gone but a moment. When I come back, it will be to escort you to your triumphant return to lead the Roman Empire. The citizens of Rome will shout for joy: ‘Nero is back to lead us, as he promised! Hail Nero! Hail Caesar!’ By your leave, sire.”
With those farewell words, Ezequeel vanished, heading to the year 285 AD and his battle with Machkiel.
Ruben moved quickly, transforming himself into a duplicate of Ezequeel. He removed Adric’s cloak, revealing dark clothing that might easily be mistaken for Ezequeel’s armor. Mouthing the words “Bye sis” to Chrymos, he walked over to Nero and announced himself. “Here I am, Caesar. We need to go.”
Nero started to speak. “But we—” Before Nero could even finish the sentence, the Rubenesque Ezequeel reached out to seize the arm of the deposed emperor and the pair vanished.
Academy of Secrets: From the Outcast Angels Christian Fantasy & Science Fiction series Page 31
