CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Beautiful is it not, brother?” asked Lucifer. We sat on a marble patio overlooking a cliff as ocean waves crashed against the rocks below.
“Lovely indeed.” I reclined into a plush couch, drinking in the scenery. The sun was a ball of molten copper dipping behind the horizon and cast an iridescent red glow on the towering clouds. Soft ocean spray gently kissed my cheeks as a warm sea breeze danced through my hair. I inhaled deeply, the pure salt air invigorating. It had been long since I saw, felt, and tasted such a marvel and I filled my senses with it.
It was all an illusion, of course. A part of my mind reminded me that if Lucifer dropped this illusion I would be staring at nothing but a dark and bleak city covered in thick haze from the collapsed coliseum. I pushed the thought from my mind.
“How I long to soar across that seascape,” I said, inhaling again.
“One day, brother, we shall both soar in the upper spheres again.” Lucifer stood at my side. He hadn’t changed at all since I last saw him so many years ago. Tall and commanding, his wavy black, shoulder length hair rippled in the ocean breeze. His features were still strong and handsome, his physique muscular. He wore a black tunic with gold trim. Even his wings were white and pristine.
His appearance could all be part of the illusion for all I knew. Perhaps it was.
He turned towards me and smiled warmly, placing a hand on my shoulder. “I’ve missed you, Sariel. It warms my heart to see you again. You’ve certainly taken your time for a visit. After your reunion with Mephistopheles I expected to see you sooner.”
“I’ve been a little preoccupied lately.”
“Yes. I understand you took a liking to the gladiatorial sports.” His eyes twinkled with a mirthful glee. “It’s as good a distraction as any for the likes of us, I suppose.”
Us, he said as if I were like him. I was not like him, could never be like him. “I’m afraid my interest in that sport was passing at best.”
“So I understand,” he said, grinning. “Shame about the coliseum though.”
I stared at him. He showed no irritation at all. He truly didn’t care that I destroyed the coliseum. What did he care about? “I got a little carried away in the heat of the moment.”
He chuckled. “Haven’t we all.”
“I daresay your destruction is on a much grander scale. Entire spheres have fallen from your tantrums.”
His face hardened. Perhaps I pressed too hard with that comment. Good. Until I received a real emotion from him I couldn’t gauge how far he would allow himself to be pushed.
“Come now, Sariel, I didn’t destroy the spheres and I couldn’t even if I wanted to. Perhaps I nudged events in the current direction but the falling of the spheres is too grand in scale for any one of us.”
“Which is why, I’m sure, you employed Mephistopheles to aid you.”
“Hardly. Even with you, Michael, Uriel and all the rest of our family we could not destroy the spheres. It’s too large. There can be only one explanation for their destruction.”
“Which is?”
“In good time, Sariel. I’ll answer all your questions in good time. But perhaps you could satisfy a curiosity for me? How did you do it, brother? How did you reawaken the Akashic Halls?”
I turned my attention back to the goblet on the small table before me and filled it from a pitcher of water. I drained it before answering him. “What makes you think I did?”
“I have standing orders that any disturbance within the Akashic Halls is to be investigated and I am to be notified at once. The fact that they found you within the underground chamber and on the floor tells me much.”
“I imagine so. I suspect it was similar to the experience you had when you witnessed a vision of your own?”
Lucifer smiled. “Very good, Sariel. What else did you discover?”
“Only that the vision you received disturbed you greatly. Why else would you have destroyed the Akashic Halls?”
“Why indeed? But it appears I did a poor job of it. You somehow managed to make it all rather work again.”
“The building, the pools, the entire atmosphere of the Akashic Halls were merely a medium to calm the mind,” I deduced. “They were not necessary. Access to the Akashic records is still very much intact.”
“Hmm, I was afraid that could be the case. Thank you for that. I’ll have to bury it so deep it can never be found or used again, I suppose. So what did you see there, Sariel? What did the Akashic tell you?”
“Does it matter? The Akashic only reveals what happened in the past. I’m more concerned about the future.”
Lucifer’s eyes tightened, his smile hardening. I pushed him too far, I realized at once, and didn’t even know it. He was angry and I couldn’t fathom why.
“One thing you must know about me, Sariel, is that I abhor duplicity. I absolutely despise hypocrisy. In fact, I abhor untruths of any kind. You must know that the Akashic is not just a capture of the past. It’s the communicative representation of cosmic consciousness, or God’s consciousness, which is the culmination of all that was, is, or will be. It can reveal anything that one deeply concentrates on.”
I frowned. I hadn’t known. The Akashic could reveal the future? Is that why Lucifer went mad and shattered the spheres? Was the knowledge he discovered there too much for him? It must have been. After all, who could accept everything one sees? Sometimes the truth is better left unknown.
“I saw three visions,” I said after a moment.
Lucifer’s eyes softened then narrowed in deep interest. “Three. Unusual indeed. What were they?”
I shrugged and told him. He listened with interest as I recalled the visions of the snake eating its tale endlessly, the balanced scales, and the final vision of the diamond encased in a clay body of a child along with seven jewels, each representing one of the highest seven spheres.
He was visibly shaken after I finished. He walked over to a table and poured himself some wine, downed it, then poured again. “Do you know the meaning of your visions?” he asked softly.
I had no idea. But he didn’t need to know that. I tried a different tact. “It’s your turn. What happened to you? What did you see that made you abandon us?”
“I did not abandon you, Sariel. I could never do that. I did not abandon anyone. What I did was for the good of us all.”
I felt my fury rise but I controlled it. “What good did you do, Sammael? All I see is atrocities committed by you or in your name.”
“Don’t call me that!” he snapped. “One day that will be my name again but not now. Not yet. Not until I earn it.”
“Answer my question, Lucifer,” I pressed. “What good did you do for all of us?”
“Don’t sit there and judge me, brother! You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed, what I had to do to serve God.”
“Serve God? You hate God!”
“Hate God?” He laughed sadly. “How ludicrous. My love has never been stronger. I daresay it is stronger than yours, or even Michael’s. Who else could have done what I did knowing the destruction it would cause? Who else would have sacrificed so much so willingly? I did not choose the path that I am on. It chose me. And I embraced it because I must.”
“You have free will just as any of us. No one forced you to shatter the spheres.”
“Free will is a myth! Do you think I could do anything without God’s blessing?”
“Are you telling me you destroyed the spheres because God wanted you to?”
“How could it be otherwise? How can I have free will when God already knows what I’m going to do and has planned for it?”
“Presposterous. What you say goes against everything we have ever believed.”
“And that is the problem!” he shouted, flinging his goblet. His rage was colossal, the illusion of the seascape flickered. So did he. For an instant, I no longer saw the Sammael that I knew – I saw someone else entirely and it chilled me. His eyes were red, his face was stretched, teeth po
inted, and hair receded. Two horns curled down from his brow. His wings were blackened and veined, his arms bulging, his fingers long with sharp and cracked nails. His legs were covered in hair and his feet resembled cloven hooves. I turned away, appalled.
“Look at me, Sariel.”
I did. He was the Sammael of old.
“What did you see?” he asked, his face pained.
“It was not you that I saw but a creature that stood in your place. It had your build but it could not have been you.”
“But it was me,” he said softly, his voice breaking as he turned away. “You saw what I have become.”
“Impossible. It was an illusion, merely something you projected.”
“It was me. Exactly as God had showed it to me in the Akashic Halls so many years ago.” He wheeled to face me. “You want to know what happened to me? Why I originally left our little family? I left to find my purpose, because I knew I wasn’t serving God to my fullest ability. I had more to offer, much more. Everyone else in our family knew their place. Michael was our leader, Gabriel our messenger, Uriel our will, Raphael our knowledge, you were our faith. Even Mephistopheles was known for his love of truth. We all had our place. But what was mine, Sariel? Tell me, what was mine?”
I remained silent. I didn’t know. Next to Michael, Sammael was the strongest of us, of that I had no doubt. But he had no specific function that I was aware of. I struggled to come up with an answer.
He laughed at my discomfort. “Your reaction was the same as Michael’s when I asked him. No one knows. That is why I needed to find out. I was meant for greatness, Sariel. I could feel it. The thought plagued me constantly. So I went to the Akashic to discover who I was. That was over fifty years ago.”
He paused, walking to the patio rail and stared at the seascape. I said nothing, waiting for him to continue.
“After many weeks of meditation, the truth was revealed to me in a vision,” he said minutes later, his voice pained and thick with emotion. “I saw an image of myself. I stood naked, arms and legs outstretched. The left side of me was as Archangel with sun and blue skies. The right side was of a beast, horned, cloven hoofed, and scarred with thunderclouds behind me. That is what I saw.”
“Why should that trouble you so? Visions are symbolic. The image of the beast wasn’t literal.”
“Don’t you see? I asked what I was meant for. God revealed it to me. He showed me what I was and what I was capable of becoming. And they were both the same!”
“You could be mistaken.”
“Why else would He reveal the vision to me? I prayed ceaselessly for Him to answer the question of my purpose. The vision was the answer to my prayer. It revealed to me the greatness I was meant for. It showed me what I must do to serve Him to the fullest. That’s when I realized. I must become what I abhor most.”
“And what was that?”
“Duplicity, of course.”
The answer caught me off guard. “How so?”
“Do you know what our greatest sin is, Sariel?”
I knew mine – I lost my faith when I lost Requel. But I couldn’t speak for anyone else. I shook my head no.
“It’s to forget who we are. That is our greatest sin. To believe that we are something other than angels created in the image of God. To forget our place in God’s creation, to forget our origin, to forget ourselves. There is no sin greater.”
“And what does this have to do with you?”
“My service to God is to introduce duplicity, or duality as I call it, into his worlds, to introduce a reality that is no more real than a dream. It can feel stronger than what most angels know because it is contrary to what they’re accustomed to. Instead of harmony I introduced war; instead of love I introduced fear; instead of only life now it is mixed with death. Duality. That is my function. That is what I was chosen for.”
My blood froze. “But why?”
“To test them, of course. To give them a choice. Either be caught up in the chaos or rise above it. Those that rise above the illusion of chaos, the false duality I created, will remain pure and strong and remember who they are. Those that are weak will be swept up in the illusion, suffer, and fall from astral paradise. They are the lost ones. This is my service to God. To separate the wheat from the chaff. What I do is thankless but it must be done.”
“You shattered the spheres to test them?” I asked slowly, my mind reeling from the words I was hearing.
“Precisely. To reveal who is worthy of God’s paradise and who is not.”
“Who are you to put conditions on God’s love?” I cried, my patience lost. “What makes you think they need to be worthy to live in peace?”
“God does!” he shouted back, his image flickering into the beast. “Haven’t you been listening? He’s making me do this!”
Madness. He was mad. “Lucifer, you need to listen to me now. God is not making you do this. Why would He? These are your actions, not His. Think about it.”
“I have spent the last five decades thinking about it! Do you think I want this? Do you think for a moment that this is what I envisioned myself to be? I was Archangel!” he shouted. “But I know who I am now and I know what I must do. There is no other way.”
“God is love and harmony,” I said patiently. “Not this chaos you created.”
He smiled triumphantly. “Now you’re beginning to see. Those that remember the true meaning behind your simple words will not fall. They will remain pure.”
“Your logic is flawed. I believe that God is love and harmony with all my heart. But I, too, have fallen despite how much I believe it. How does that fit within your designs?”
“Simple. Either you don’t believe with all your heart as you say, so you truly have fallen. Or you do believe, and you only think you have fallen, but in fact have remained Sariel the Archangel. Which one is it? Only you can decide.”
I sat there, stunned. “I have committed atrocities. I have committed murder. I don’t have to decide. My actions have decided for me. If that is not fallen, then what is?”
“Rise above them, Sariel! You are not your actions. That is what I’m trying to tell you. They are in the past. Bury them. They are a dead beast. Don’t fall for the illusion. You can rise above your deeds. You must.”
I couldn’t believe my ears and almost laughed at the irony of it. Lucifer, the architect of destruction, was trying to convince me that I was still pure while I, who only wished I could help those in need, was convinced that I was fallen. I realized how flawed Lucifer’s plan was and I gave voice to it. “You didn’t test them. You corrupted them.”
His lips peeled back in anger. “If they were pure, how could I corrupt them? I set them free! I revealed them to themselves. If they had darkness within them then all I did was draw it out. I let the darkness inside them become tangible. Let it materialize so all would know who they are. After all, how can they have darkness in their hearts and still call themselves angels? That’s all I’ve done here. I introduced a choice for them to forget who they were and they did so willingly! They are created in the image of God, they should be incorruptible! You believe in free will. They exercised it and chose poorly.”
I shook my head. “You forget one thing. Environment is stronger than will.” Shock registered on his face. A flicker of doubt, perhaps? I pressed on. “You created an environment so strong, so overpowering, that it eclipsed free will. Angels became victims. They were swept away when war ravaged across the spheres. Tell me, Lucifer, how does one rise above the point of a spear that is about to impale him? How is that free will? What choice do they have?”
He threw his head back and laughed. “I know what you’re doing and it won’t work. You’re testing me as I tested you. Well done.”
“I’m not testing you, Lucifer. I’m asking you. Stop this experiment of yours. Stop it before it destroys us all.”
“No! I must never stop. It must never stop. Not until they realize who they are, where they come from.”
“H
ow far will you go?”
“Until God stops me! I have no illusions, brother. God is in control here. He always was.”
“You’re mistaken. Do not justify your actions by claiming they are divine when it is your own sense of self-importance that drives you.”
“How can I make you understand?” he said earnestly, without anger. “Here, let me show you something. Perhaps this will help.”
He waved his hand and the seascape vanished to be replaced by a wall of white light. A large glowing orb appeared in the light outlined in black. Horizontal lines divided the circle until there were sixteen glowing layers within it.
“This was the astral plane as we knew it with sixteen spheres.” Slowly, the spheres turned gray one by one, starting with the third. It swept downward first before rising upwards and stopping at the eighth sphere. The circle was equally divided now; the upper half with eight spheres glowed brightly while the lower half was grayed out. “There are no longer sixteen spheres. Only eight. If I weren’t doing God’s will, wouldn’t you agree He would’ve stopped me long ago?”
The stark image, so simplistically laid out, had a profound effect on me. I felt a deep sadness well up. Why had God let His astral plane suffer so? Why had He let countless angels fall or die? Would He have allowed it if it wasn’t His will? Doubts assailed me.
“I can see you’re starting to believe,” Lucifer said, not unkindly. “Truth can be painful, as I well know.”
“I cannot watch this.” I averted my gaze and stared at him. “How could you let the fallen claim the lower spheres as their own?”
“I did not let them, brother, and I longer refer to those occupied by the fallen as spheres. The spheres are for the worthy, the angels, those that are still loyal to God. No, the fallen are not worthy of such. I refer to the lower spheres as circles now. Circles of Hell. And I despise all who dwell there.”
I blinked. Lucifer judged his flock, just as I judged them in the coliseum. Even his words were similar to mine, and equally loathing, before I crushed them under a mountain of rubble. Were the two of us so different after all?
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