Chapter Twenty
He was everywhere and nowhere all at once. Light slowly returned to us, a single pinprick golden glow, the only visible part of the Gates of Heaven. The darkness slowly coalesced into the form of a man, gathering depth until it seemed to be a statue carved from onyx. The light of Heaven slowly returned, dimmed, flowing into Yaotl’s body and absorbing. He wasn’t quite featureless. His skin was mottled like a black panther ’s, a dull matte finish that drank in the light surrounding it. Only his right foot shone, polished like glass, like an ancient mirror. Inside, darkness swirled and rippled.
Cain looked exhausted and confused, unsure as to what his next move should be. I swallowed hard, hoping that nobody would notice the slight tremble in my knees.
“That’s it, huh? All the sound and fury, and we just wind up here staring at a seven-foot-tall Golem?”
Jaguar ’s head rotated slowly, his eyes, or rather, the two small glowing slits in his head that I thought were his eyes, regarded me. His shoulders raised, then lowered, a sigh. He reared back and hit me in the stomach. I felt the shock of his hand, a cold vacuum, pass though my midsection. His arm briefly lost its form, breaking into a swirling mist before coalescing again at his side. He raised his hand, studying it, then turned his gaze to Cain.
“Incomplete,” his voice rasped, like rusty nails on scrap metal.
“Your vessel awaits,” Abel said, giving Aspen a slight push forward.
She drove the Spear of the Requiter into the ground and knelt before Jaguar, her eyes on the ground. He passed a hand through her chin and I saw her shudder. Without a word, she lowered herself further onto both knees. She grabbed her tunic and tore it to her midsection, exposing her chest to Jaguar.
“No!” Lenny shouted. “He can’t have her!”
Lenny scuttled in front of Aspen and tried to kiss her foot.[36]
He backed up a few paces. “Aspen?”
Jaguar took a few swipes at him, but again couldn’t make contact. He seemed to be trying to leave his insubstantial hand inside of Lenny’s head, but there was something about Lenny preventing him from getting inside. He wasn’t passing through Lenny’s skull, but breaking against it, flowing around it like water around a rock.
“Aspen. Please!”
She blinked, slowly raising one hand to clasp her shirt shut as if seeing Lenny for the first time. “Lenny? What happened to you? What did they do?”
“I’m not important right now. But if you have to know, it’s all Lucifer ’s fault. You have to stop this. If you go through with this, we’ll never have a chance to be together again.”
“There is no more us ,” Aspen droned. “No more me or you. Everything changed. Everything changes...”
“If you stop this, if you turn this around, they’ll have to reward us, right? I could get my body back, we’d be together again! Don’t do this, please! Just back away from the spear.”
“Everything changed back to normal,” Aspen whispered. “but...I like it...I like this...”
“Like what? You can’t possibly mean you—SPLORT!”
I felt something sharp strike my cheek and fall to the ground, bouncing off my shoe. Lenny’s tooth. He hadn’t so much said splort as made the noise when Aspen cleaved his head in two with the Spear of The Righteous. I hadn’t even seen her move, but she was on her feet, the air behind her still rippling from the downward arc created by her death strike.
“Everything changes.”
Lenny was nothing now, less than nothing, a pile of meat. Everything we’d been through to get here, and his journey was cut short.[37] I saw the fingers of my former right hand splayed at sickening angles, giving small twitches as they faded to grey. And amidst the redness and muck inside Lenny’s head was one perfect sphere, glowing red. Lenny’s anima crystal? No…no, it was mine. But if my first crystal was in Lenny’s head…what was in me?
I reached towards it, but before I could make contact, it was enveloped in shadow. Jaguar surrounded it and the mists of his hand began to take on the same shine that his foot, The Mirror of Smoke, had. Fingers newly formed and polished clasped the sphere, raised it to his lips, and he bit into it like an overripe fruit. The crystal exploded, drenching his mouth and creating a grisly cascade of crimson down his chest, warpaint, as his body fully solidified and shone with the exact opposite of the light of Heaven that surrounded us.
My stomach lurched, and I felt everything I was drain down to my knees. I was hollow.
Abel stepped forward and knelt, opening his box and presenting the contents to Jaguar. My last chance at salvation. My second crystal.
The Smoke God drew it out and crushed it in his hand, smearing its essence on his chest, drawing vicious stripes across his arms and cheeks. He was prepared for battle.
“Oh that look on your face is priceless, Morningstar,” Cain sneered. “I know what you’re thinking. If these crystals both belong to you, what happened back in Copperopolis? Whose essence did you absorb?”
He kicked at a fragment of Lenny’s skull. “We had to bond you to him. He was deteriorating so fast, and we needed you to carry him here for us. You were holding part of his essence, an umbilicus to let him continue to shuffle around, to bring everything we needed to the Gates of Heaven.”
Lenny hadn’t been my battery. I was his .
“He stole your crystals. Not of his own volition, mind you.”
“Because you’re not man enough to carry them,” I said, jabbing a finger towards him for emphasis. “This is where we draw...the...line?” I waggled my arm slowly. My right hand, once a beautiful dark crimson energy force, was dimming and dying like an old light bulb. It shrank and receded to a dull ember, then faded to nothing.
“We convinced Nin-Agal to make us a box to carry them. And then he betrayed us by holding one back. So we made sure you got to visit him. You made it so easy to use you. And now, I don’t think we have much use for you at all.”
Jaguar took a hesitant step forward, testing his weight, feeling his balance shift in a physical form for the first time in eons. He smiled, his teeth a row of gleaming black mirrors. He planted his feet and stretched to his full height, probably ten feet or so.
“I was once the universe. I was everything,” he rumbled. “You don’t need to draw the line, Lucifer Morningstar. You merely need to understand. I was you. You were once me. And we shall be one again.”
“You’ll never take it, you know. You won’t take His throne.”
“I don’t want his throne. I don’t want to rule. I have no need of it. When I Am , I Am All .”
“All of the Angels and Saints of Heaven stand on the other side of that wall, armed, ready to do battle with you,” I said. “Not that you’d have the power to breach those walls. Lord knows I’ve been trying for millennia.”
“Look upon me,” Jaguar said. “See her fate. See your failure. See her break.”
His body swirled into mist and his chest began to glow. With a noise like an axe striking wood, his chest suddenly split open. Two smoky tendrils shot from his heart and rammed into my eyes. The impact was cold, numbing. My brain exploded into starlight and gold. At first I thought it was something he’d done to me, an assault, but then I realized I was seeing the inside of Heaven. Floating high above the main road to the Palace of the Lord. I scanned the horizon, and saw angels in flight, spinning and circling at a single spot just near the Gates. My guess is, we were on the other side of that wall, and they were preparing a proper welcome. As much as they wanted to repel Jaguar, I knew some of them would be looking out for me as well.
Jaguar shifted my attention away from the periphery and down the main thoroughfare. Three small dots shuffled hastily alongside a fence, trying to keep out of sight. I floated closer, descending until I was a few yards above them. Monkey, Eve, and Cerberus.
The dog was happily running a few yards ahead of the group, sniffing at the walls, stopping to mark his territory every so often, then turning back as if to urge Monkey and Eve on. Monke
y scampered along the top of the wall, checking ahead to see if they were being followed.
“I don’t suppose you know which way we need to go?” he asked.
“First time here,” Eve replied. Her face was flushed.
“This is a bad idea,” Monkey replied. “You’re not supposed to see him.”
“We’re not supposed to be here at all, but you got us in. It’s a good day for breaking rules, right?” She laughed.
“Good point,” Monkey said. “So what’s Adam into? Where would we find him hanging out?”
“I haven’t seen him since the beginning of time. He liked nature.”
“I don’t get it,” Monkey said. “First time I met you, you seemed, you know, independent. Like you’d snap a guy’s sack off if he told you what to do.”
“Adam never told me what to do,” she replied. “You seem like the type of guy who’s had his sack threatened quite a bit.”
“I’ve had every part of me threatened before. No big deal. Did I ever tell you about the time I—” “Probably,” Eve said.
They rounded a corner onto a wider vista. Where Angel Falls felt like a mad sprawling metropolis, Heaven was neat. Designed. Mathematically perfect, but not at all dull. The buildings were made of solid light, as were the streets. It’s where all of those rumors about gold in Heaven came from. Nothing here was made of metal. Everything was made of potential . God loved all of the organic mess of Earth though, so every block or so, there was a tidy space for parks, trees, and ponds. There was a small river flowing on one side of the streets, the water teeming with life, an endless flow of colors and shapes. Fish danced over turtles that slowly crawled at the bottom, all of them progressing downstream towards God’s Palace.
Eve stooped to point at a particularly round turtle. “I remember when we named this one…”
Heaven dimmed for a moment. The walls, the streets, the buildings, everything lost a bit of brightness briefly, flickering like a candle in a breeze. A shout, in unison, echoed down the streets from the general direction of the Gates.
“What the hell was that?” Monkey asked.
Cerberus turned to scamper back towards them, slowing down and eventually stopping in midair. Monkey and Eve had stopped moving as well. The sounds fuzzed out in my ears and I heard Jaguar ’s voice. “This was the point that Cain drew me into your reality. The light will flicker again and extinguish completely in a few minutes, at the point I took my solid form. It will send the Monkey into a panic and give the Woman resolve. She will rush, she will become careless.”
“I think,” said Eve, snapping back into motion, “He’s planting flowers. I don’t know how I know, but I know.”
Monkey peered around. “Let’s head for the Palace then. Palaces always have gardens, right?”
“Cerberus!” Monkey said. The dog’s heads perked up. “You smell any flowers?”
Alpha and Omega looked disinterested, but Princess perked up. She always loved a good roll in a flowerbed. “Go get ‘em!” Monkey commanded.
Cerberus responded by running in a tight circle, whining and thumping its tail on the ground.
Monkey stopped and sniffed at the air. “Eve?”
“Do you smell that?” she asked.
I could smell it too somehow, even in my non-corporeal state. Earth, fresh and raw like newly tilled soil. The smell was vital, invigorating. There was a noise building, a rhythmic thudding as the scent grew stronger.
“Eve? Eve!” A voice boomed around the corner.
Eve froze on the spot, falling to her knees. Her fingers trailed across the ground, leaving freshly sprouted lines of grass in their wake. He stepped around the corner, as glorious as I remember him on the day of his creation. His skin was flawless, his muscles lean. He was, in short, a living work of art, a thing of nigh- perfection sculpted by a master. His hair fell in perfect ringlets to his shoulders, and he had the quiet confidence of a man whose job is simple but vital.
“Adam.”
Monkey hopped down from the wall and landed in between them. “Look, I apologize in advance for being the cosmic cockblock that brings this party down, but I don’t think you two are supposed to get together. There are rules!”
I smiled to myself. Monkey demanding that people respect the rules.
The ground surrounding Eve was a veritable meadow, rapidly spreading down the street towards Adam. Cerberus was overjoyed, rolling on its back in the grass, lost in the doggy ideal of Heaven, kicking its paws joyously at the sky above.
Jaguar floated me higher so that I was directly above the first lovers. His voice rustled through my head like dry leaves on pavement. “Watch her heart break, Morningstar. Witness the seeds of her destruction planted, and know that yours was the hand that made it possible .”
They were motionless, two people at either end of a thirty- foot strip of paradise that had spontaneously sprouted amidst the gleaming streets of Heaven. Adam knelt down and dug his hands into the earth, delighting at the feel of the soil in his hands. Eve was crying now. Adam began to approach her.
“Seriously, guys. I mean, I love you guys and all, but you can’t do this. I don’t mean to play the god card here—”
“You’re hardly a god, Monkey,” Eve whispered. “Get out of his way.”
Adam picked up his pace, walking a straight line directly towards Eve. Monkey sprang at him, wrapping his tail around Adam’s neck while he hammered on his chest. “You’re gonna kill her, you idiot! Look, if The Boss says you guys aren’t supposed to touch each other, then you have to respect—”
Adam pinched his fingers together at the nape of Monkey’s neck and tossed him casually over his shoulder and down the street. Cerberus perked up and barreled off to fetch Monkey and bring him back.
Eve was still on her knees, a row of delicate orchids sprouting into bloom near her thighs, forming a procession towards Adam. The fragrance was overpowering as they burst into a wild explosion of color and scent. Adam slowed his pace a bit, smiling and trailing his fingertips across the petals as he continued towards Eve. She shuddered at the touch, even as he was five yards away.
A ripple formed in the streets, a slight bend in the air. Reality became briefly convex, then concave. The fissure between them was almost unnoticeable, a thin black filament that started at the sidewalk to Eve’s left and traced a line across the road.
There was a noise, or rather, the sudden absence of all noise as Adam drew tantalizingly close to Eve. He sensed something was about to happen and almost lunged, straining to caress his wife’s cheek.
The light drained from everything again in a heartbeat, this time not returning. A rapid-fire series of earth-shattering cracks raced through the streets, and reality rearranged itself once more. What had been a razor-thin slice in the ground was now a chasm. Adam stood dumbfounded on one side of the precipice, his fingers still reaching, moving in expectance of a caress that wasn’t going to come. Eve remained on her knees on the other side, devastated. The pit between them was fathomless, black, and writhing with dark energy. No, with people. Souls. This was the moment that Jaguar had regained his full form.
Jaguar ’s laugh rattled my spine. “Look at them all trying to come through. All she wanted was to touch her husband, and now she’ll have to watch as God’s army proceeds to slay her children one by one.”
There was a flurry of white and silver, as the lesser ranks of angels arrived and surrounded the pit, obscuring Adam and Eve’s view of each other. The wretched souls were rising up like a sewage flood. They struggled blindly to find their way into Heaven through these newly-formed rifts in reality. This chasm was one access point fed by infinite portals throughout Hell. And it was growing.
It was all the distraction Jaguar would need to find his way inside.
I began to rise, and I watched as Monkey wrenched himself free from Cerberus’ jaws, bounding over the heads of angels and the outstretched arms of the damned to make his way back to Eve’s side of the breach. He took her by the hand and pu
lled her away from the brink and down the street. Her eyes were always looking backwards, her cries of protest audible even above the fierce battle.
“It’s love, Morningstar. Love destroys everything. Let me show you.” Jaguar ’s presence in my brain shook loose, and I was back at the Gates, standing defenseless before him. His chest slammed shut with a loud crack. My psyche felt bruised, as if his hooks had left barbs inside my mind.
I was shaky on my feet, vaguely aware of Goliath’s presence at my side. Aspen stood at her full height, brandishing the Spear of the Requiter. She’d cast off all of her armor, naked, her body decorated with the war paint of Jaguar ’s foul black essence in a negative image of the red he’d smeared on himself. Her eyes glowed a faint nacreous green.
“I am All. She is the vessel,” Jaguar croaked.
Cain and Abel circled to our rear. Jaguar took a step towards me. Phaleg’s sword remained in the ground, the light of Heaven slowly circling the drain its wound had created. Goliath drew his sword and I grasped the hilt of Phaleg’s weapon. I tried to pull it free, but it wouldn’t budge. A glowing hand rested on top of mine, gently pushing me back. “Please,” Phaleg said, “allow me. This isn’t over yet.”
Phaleg spread his wings and flared , a corona of light surrounding his head. “COME BRETHREN! BATTLE!” His breath was still fairly ragged, but his strength was still there. He drew the sword from the ground, causing a small geyser of dark matter to rocket towards the sky.
An explosion rippled the air around us, the sound of brass and light and All Things Good. The Gates of Heaven were cast open and I could see the silhouette of God’s Vanguard: Michael and Gabriel, come to join Phaleg in this final battle.[38]
“This is all He’s sending, then?” I asked. Michael and Gabriel drew alongside of us.
“Nice to see you again as well, Morningstar,” Michael smiled. He never smiled except when he was preparing to draw blood.
Phaleg brandished the weapon. “This is what you seek, isn’t it? This sword that you forged so long ago? I’ve slain many a demon with this blade. It has the essence of their souls. Darkness to drive away the darkness. And now,” he took a step forward and lowered himself to one knee, laying the sword across his palms, extending it towards Yaotl, “it is yours.”
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