The Realm

by A. Q. Owen

  The only signs of aging on him were subtle dark circles under the eyes, barely noticeable unless someone was really looking. And no one ever did, unless he was laying out plans, or it was during a time of reverent worship where all gazed upon his brilliance.

  Lucifer had been the closest of all the angels to the Creator. He’d been a part of nearly everything the Godhead had done since his inception. Perhaps a tiny part of the fatigue visible on his face was from the pain he still carried from their betrayal, the moment when the Creator told him he couldn’t be a part of the creation of a new planet, of a new species that would be the crown jewel in the Maker’s gallery of wonders known as the multiverse.

  He’d never felt betrayal like that. For eons, nothing like that had ever existed—that he knew of. There wasn’t even a name for it in their most ancient of languages. Eventually, it came to be known as jealousy, bitterness, resentment, contempt, and a myriad of other names. That’s what the humans called it.

  Lucifer had another word he preferred: betrayal.

  Throughout the eons, the Creator and his contemporaries had done whatever they wanted in the heavens, creating new worlds, multiple universes, and species of every possible kind. During that time, Lucifer had been loyal, a leader among all the angelic hosts. He was revered as if he were one of the Gods himself. And why shouldn’t he have been? He was permitted into meetings with the Godhead that no one else was.

  That very fact is what led him to the first known question of the Gods’ rulership to ever be brought up in the endless span of time. No one had ever thought another way was possible: that maybe, just maybe, the Creator was wrong. The notion that the Gods kept secrets from any of their created beings was strange at first. Then it became a needle, digging into Lucifer’s flesh. He didn’t complain, never argued about it, until it was he who was left out of one of the meetings.

  The Gods were putting together the framework, the plan that would encompass this new universe, along with a special solar system that contained a planet full of beings made in the Creator’s own image. It was a first, something that had never been attempted before.

  The genetic planning and coding for all of it would be an immense undertaking, even for supreme immortal beings. Only the collective power of the Godhead’s minds could create such a complex system of physics, biology, and most importantly, artificial intelligence. Sure, they’d done it a million times before, but creating beings in their own image was a deeper experiment than anything anyone in the multiverse could have imagined.

  The fact that Lucifer had been excluded from that final part of the creation process of this new, fascinating universe was the last straw. He’d done everything they had ever asked of him. Everything. Why were they so selfish? He was their pride and joy, the greatest among all the angels. Why would they not share this moment with him, this triumphant spark in infinity? Did he not at least deserve that?

  It was the first time he ever felt the emotion of disappointment, and it tore at him like claws through flesh.

  Betrayal.

  That word rang through his head in a billion languages from across the cosmos.

  Those that stood before him—and the millions of fallen angels outside the Dark Palace—had rallied to his side. It turned out that more than one had felt the same doubt, experienced the same questions he had. They’d been easy to convert.

  Others, though, had stood fast. They were the loyalists, the sheep that stood by their shepherd no matter how ludicrous their obedience seemed, or how misguided.

  In the end, all their might hadn’t been enough to overthrow what he had dubbed a tyrannical regime. Perhaps it had been inevitable. They were, after all, only created beings. Immortal? For now. Time, however, was running out.

  Since the fall of mankind, Lucifer and his army had tortured humanity in every way possible. He knew that it was the only way to get back at the Creator—the single greatest insult and source of pain he could inflict on the one who betrayed him and his followers.

  The fledgling planet of Earth was still in the early stages when Lucifer was cast out of paradise. He’d had his eyes set on bringing pain and destruction to the entire multiverse, to every planet and people, but he was bound to this universe, shackled like a rabid dog in a dungeon. In a way, he was glad for that. He’d gotten much satisfaction out of swaying the humans, the only ones in the entire multiverse to be designed in the Creator’s own image. Billions of planets, solar systems, galaxies, and an almost limitless number of alien life civilizations hadn’t been turned, but the pride of the Gods had.

  For ages, Lucifer had enjoyed that fact. All along, though, he knew that pleasure was finite. Sooner or later, the end would come. He and his acolytes had left the light of the Godhead, the one thing that gave them life eternal. Without it, they would perish…eventually.

  Still, Lucifer knew that wasn’t how it all would end, not exactly. He knew the prophecies better than anyone. Down through the eons, even some humans had been able to tap into the infinite pattern of the quantum universe, the invisible power that permeates everything. These rare few had unlocked the mystery of past and future, able to gaze into the tracks that diverged as a result of human decisions, observations, and beliefs.

  No, Lucifer and his minions would not perish from old age. They would be wiped out in the final judgment, on the Plains of Megiddo. There, the Creator would erase his “grand mistake” forever. Unless Lucifer could somehow find a way to defeat the Godhead.

  He’d learned from his mistakes in the war in heaven, but even with that wisdom and knowledge he’d yet to find a way to defeat the Gods.

  Now this.

  One of his lieutenants had been struck down in the streets. No one seemed to know what happened. Thus the reason for this…meeting.

  “Am I to understand that no one here saw how Ashgog was killed?”

  A gigantic angel stepped forward and bowed his head low, bending one knee for a moment and placing his elbow on it as a show of reverence and respect. He waited to be addressed directly before speaking.

  “General Tharin,” Lucifer said, extending his right hand. “Speak. By all means, if you have any information about how this happened, I would love to hear it.” He brought his hand back and rested his chin on it as the general began.

  “Master, my order has searched the extent of the city and the regions beyond. We’ve uncovered no answers as to how this occurred.” The creature’s voice was deep and throaty. It boomed throughout the chamber with the authority of a raging tempest. He was one of Lucifer’s seconds-in-command, and his word was unquestioned. “We…believe it was done,” he hesitated.

  “Done by who?”

  “Someone from the other side.”

  This caused an eyebrow to arch on Lucifer’s forehead. “From the other side? You mean Earth?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  The look of curiosity turned to a skeptical scowl as the dark prince considered the explanation. Then he shook his head and started laughing. The laughter built until it filled the chamber. As the leader of the heavenly choir—another of his myriad, perhaps unexpected duties as Prince of Darkness—one of Lucifer’s greatest abilities was the talent of projecting hundreds of voices simultaneously. It was one of the reasons the Creator had been so proud of him. He could sing in octaves no other being could and, as a result, made music unlike any in the multiverse. When he laughed, however, it shook the foundation of the Realm to its core, striking fear into the hearts of even the most loyal fallen angels.

  He lowered his voice and steepled his hands together in front of his face as he leaned forward. “Seriously, Tharin. That was wonderful. I haven’t laughed like that in ages. Tell me, now, what you really think happened.”

  Tharin stood erect. His massive, bulging arms were larger than some of the demons’ torsos. He was one of the largest of the fallen angels, comparable only to a few other great warriors in Lucifer’s army. Tharin’s wings were folded behind his back, but when they were spread, they span
ned nearly twenty feet.

  “I am serious, my lord.” He paused for a moment, seeing the displeased look on his master’s face. “Initially, we believed it was perhaps some kind of accident, a ripple in the space-time continuum.”

  “Yes, that sort of thing has been happening everywhere in the multiverse ever since the humans’ failure with Newton’s Gate.”

  The Realm hadn’t been immune to the micro tears in the fabric of space-time. While Lucifer and his officers knew about the portals opening across the multiverse, including many on Earth, he hadn’t heard of or seen any here in the Realm. Small tears, sure, but nothing anyone could travel through. The Creator had put safeguards in place to protect against things like that.

  “Indeed, my lord,” Tharin bowed his head again. “We considered a ripple to be what killed Ashgog, at least at first.”

  “You must have ruled that out for some reason.”

  “The wounds he suffered, the way he was killed…it was intentional, my master.”

  “Intentional?”

  “His weapon was drawn, my lord. As if he was defending himself.”

  Lucifer’s frown deepened, sending wrinkles across his porcelain forehead. He clenched his broad jaw and ran his fingernails across his brow. Then he shook his head again, still in denial.

  “No,” he said. “That isn’t possible. Am I to understand you’re telling me someone came into the Realm and killed Ashgog?”

  “From the looks of it, my liege, it was done with a sword, a weapon of immense power.”

  A million questions ran through the Dark Prince’s mind. His eyes narrowed as he tried to process what his general was insinuating. Tharin had always been loyal. He’d been one of the first to join Lucifer’s revolution. The general would never present something like this without thorough investigation.

  “Take me to his body.”

  Ashgog’s body, what was left of it, had been placed in a room on the other side of the Dark Palace, where it could be analyzed. When Lucifer and Tharin arrived, only one demon was standing at the door, guarding the room. He bowed his head and stepped aside as the Lord of Darkness approached.

  Lucifer only acknowledged him with a tick of the head.

  “I assume,” he said, “you placed a guard here in case anyone would tamper with the body?”

  “That is correct, my lord. While I am fairly certain—”

  “Shh,” Lucifer put a finger to his lips and motioned to the guard with a nod.

  Tharin understood and lowered his voice to a deep whisper. “I am certain this was done by someone from the outside.”

  Lucifer stepped over to the stone table where Ashgog’s body lay on its back. The lifeless eyes were closed. The wounds had been cleaned as best they could be, but the internal organs were still visible despite the best efforts to reattach his two halves.

  Lucifer ran a finger across the demon’s skin and then pulled back the flesh of the top half of the body. “You’re correct, my old friend. This was done by a weapon. A tear in the fabric would have cauterized the wound immediately after it was opened. And we are still immortal beings. Tears like that wouldn’t kill us. Hurt, sure, but not mortally.”

  “My findings exactly, my lord.”

  Lucifer put his hands behind his wings and stared down at the corpse. “Since we arrived here, this has never once happened. Not until the final battle are we to be attacked by the forces of the Creator. He knows that. The rules of engagement are set in stone. He agreed to them and would never break them, no matter how much it pains me to say that.”

  Tharin knew all of that. Since the conflict in heaven ended and the one with humans began, he had been well aware that they were on borrowed time. Eventually, the Godhead would return to save humankind and wipe out Lucifer and his army for all time. And there was nothing they could do to stop it.

  “That would mean…a human did this?” The Dark Prince’s question lingered in the circular room. The black marble walls echoed the sound for a moment and then let it slip out the open windows.

  “I know that sounds crazy, but that’s the conclusion I came to as well, my liege.”

  Lucifer’s eyelids blinked rapidly as he processed the hypothesis. “If you’d said something like this to me before, I would have claimed it to be impossible. Humans are not permitted in the Realm, just as we are not permitted on Earth, except for possessions and certain rituals. Even then, we can’t fully manifest ourselves on that plane in our true forms.”

  “I know. Yet here we have a murder of one of our own. The first time this has ever happened.”

  Lucifer swallowed. At first, doubt filled his heart. He didn’t let it show. He couldn’t. Weakness was not permitted in the Realm, only staunch resolve. This, however, was a problem of epic proportions.

  He spun around. “How did a human get here?”

  “We don’t know. We found the body in the middle of the city, but no trace of the human, if that’s truly who did this. Our initial idea was that a portal had opened to the Realm, but we’ve discovered no energy signatures that would suggest this to be the case.”

  Lucifer nodded his head. “No, of course not. That would be too easy.” He didn’t try to hide the anger in his voice. He raised a hand to his chin and rubbed his index finger and thumb on the corners of his lips, thinking about the implications. Then he nodded, a sinister grin creeping across his face. “Perhaps, my old friend, Ashgog’s sacrifice presents us with the solution to our greatest problem.”

  Tharin’s eyes squinted, the brows knitting together. “Sir?”

  “We are immortal beings, Tharin. Only the forces of heaven can kill us, and they have been forbidden to do so until the final battle.”

  “Where we will meet our end.”

  “Maybe.” Lucifer spun around on his heels, and he inspected the wounds to Ashgog’s body once more before twisting back to face his general. “Our greatest problem is what, Tharin?”

  “The Gods cannot be killed, with the exception of when they take human form.”

  “Correct. And that only happened once.”

  Tharin nodded in agreement.

  “But this…human rat has killed one of our kind, something that is impossible. Tell me what that means.”

  Tharin didn’t follow the line of thought and shook his head.

  Lucifer’s eyes widened with excitement that hadn’t been there since he’d first recruited Tharin to his side so many ages ago, when he realized they didn’t have to play by the Creator’s rules any longer.

  “Don’t you see, Tharin? If a human found a way to kill one of us, an immortal being, that means a weapon exists that could—”

  “Kill the Creator.” The epiphany washed over the general’s face, taking the form of a wicked expression of satisfaction.

  “Exactly.”

  15

  Lightning cracked over the city skyline. Branches of white-hot bolts streaked through the thick clouds as the storm churned over the skyscrapers and high-rise apartments.

  Orion stood by the window, looking out at the street below and the tall buildings that populated downtown. He felt an exhaustion unlike anything he’d ever experienced. The only explanation was what had happened earlier with the demon Ashgog, and maybe the whole interdimensional travel thing.

  He looked down at the ring on his finger. He’d slipped it back on after Myra Koch left.

  The woman was lying, straight through her perfectly white teeth. Shame she wasn’t a good person; at least that was the read he’d made on her. She was beautiful in a professional sort of way, but there was no denying that she was up to something. His feeling was that it couldn’t be good.

  He’d never heard of her or her little operation that monitored magic users in the city or wherever their jurisdiction led. Was it a nationwide operation? Global network? The way she had said it made him think it was the latter. To monitor power spikes like she described would require satellites, sensors, and detection systems all over the planet.

  The more h
e thought about it, the less Orion felt like he needed sleep, and the more he felt the pressing need to get out of his house.

  They’d be watching him. Of that there was little doubt. Orion had worked for secret agencies in the past, both as an official asset and as an off-the-books special ops assassin.

  He’d tried to leave that life behind, but it seemed that snake would rear its ugly head no matter which way he turned. A career in a new field should have changed all that, yet here he was using new weapons and skills to ply an old trade against mythical creatures. In another dimension, no less.

  His eyes drifted down to the ring on his finger. It rested silent, unmoving, the blackened four-sided cross dormant for the time being.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance and shook his thoughts back to the moment.

  He raised his head again and looked out. On the rooftop across the street, he made out the silhouette in the shadows, illuminated by the lightning flashes in the sky beyond.

  “Yep,” he muttered through pursed lips. “There you are.”

  Orion shook his head and turned toward the kitchen. He strode slowly over to the fridge and pulled it open, planting one hand on the top freezer door to brace himself as he inspected the sparse contents within. There were three beers, an old sandwich, some condiments, and a pizza box that had probably been there for a week, but he didn’t really remember or care.

  He grabbed one of the beer cans and closed the door, popping the top with one flick of the thumb, then wandered over to the couch and slouched into it. He felt like gravity was working twice as hard as normal. He dumped a quarter of the beer into his throat and swallowed it with a wince. It was colder than he’d expected, but he didn’t care.

  Normally, this would be the time of night where he was already five or six drinks deep. Maybe more. Yet he was starkly sober. The realization hit him as he stared at the can, savoring the toasty flavor of the drink.