by Drew Foote
He was Conquest.
Those same hands, however, had also caressed and nurtured. His hands had held loved ones close as they slipped from the world. They had cleaned dirt from the wounds of clumsy toddlers. Walter’s hands had built glorious monuments to a God who did not care for the works of His children. He had healed. He had embraced.
He was Love.
Walter was all this, and more. He was an impossible juxtaposition of light and darkness. He was every hope of humankind, and every corpse it ever produced.
Walter Nathaniel Grey was a human.
Perhaps the most human of all.
~
Walter’s body could go no further. The will was there, but the strength was not. He fought to keep his legs moving, but they could no longer find traction within the black morass of Limbo. He collapsed, gasping, onto the formless ground.
He shuddered and wheezed, the breath crushed from his lungs. The weight of countless souls smothered him, cackling with sadistic delight. There could be no salvation within their embrace, no release. All would be ashes, just like them.
“No,” Walter mouthed feebly. No sound came out.
Life slipped from his tenuous grasp, so recently forced into the body he now inhabited. His ancient fingers clawed the ground with desperation, digits hooked into claws. He struggled to drag himself forward against the black current that swept against him.
Walter inched slowly forward into the darkness, mouth snarling with determination. He must go on. He must continue fighting.
He could not. The weight was too great, the pain too much. His eyes rolled madly as the abyssal world flickered like a broken projector. He felt his last breaths rattle in his chest. His heart shuddered and threatened to stop.
Walter had failed once more. Here, at the end of all things, he had proven himself worthless. The thought cavorted in his soul as he descended into darkness.
Walter’s eyes opened weakly, a final time, as he felt the swirl of mist parting before him. He looked up with a mixture of dread, disappointment, and eagerness as he saw his destroyer draw close. Something monstrous approached, and even the noxious fog appeared to retreat from its approach.
Walter welcomed his end: an end to the surrounding anguish.
An enormous shape, hideous and alien, loomed before him.
Chapter 38
The Blistering Crown
Heat.
Pain.
The world around Kalyndriel was one of blinding fire, its orange radiance consuming the entirety of existence. It scourged her, stripping away layers of her marble skin. Shining light leaked from jagged lesions in her ripped façade as her essence threatened to boil away in the face of Uriel’s wrath.
Kalyndriel bared her teeth in a defiant snarl. Her platinum hair whipped in the blistering gale, her wings outstretched and proud. The determination in her heart howled as fiercely as the surrounding flames, and she would not be unmade; her soul was too ferocious to wither in a pathetic bonfire of the vanities.
She looked around, trying to discern Uriel’s form in the luminous blaze, but she could see nothing. All was radiance. All was heat.
Kalyndriel had to end this, to stop Uriel for the last time. His treachery threatened the fabric of the entire cosmos; she could not allow him to survive. Uriel had betrayed both his God and his brethren of millennia.
The punishment for traitors was death.
It was no longer about vengeance to Kalyndriel. It was about justice, order, and protecting the weak. It was about doing her duty as an Avenging Angel, as the Lance of Justice she was born to be. Furious resolve poured from the deep wellspring of her heart, cold and pure. Even in the midst of Uriel’s firestorm, Kalyndriel shone.
The flames intensified. The fire spoke to her, its voice rough and scalding. It gasped like a breathing forge.
“Tell me, child … do you hate me?”
Kalyndriel cast about in the blinding haze to find the source of Uriel’s voice, but it seemed to surround her on all sides. She could make out no shapes. She could not find the betrayer.
“No,” Kaly finally answered, and she realized that it was true. The anger was there, as it would always be, but it did not consume her. “I pity you, Uriel.”
The fire roared with derisive laughter. “Pity?” it scorned. “Save your pity for humanity, child. It is they who you consign to an eternity of damnation, by your actions.”
“Spare me your lies, Uriel. You do not do this for humanity; you care nothing for their fate.”
Strands of Kalyndriel’s shimmering hair rose in the steaming updrafts, gliding through the air like radiant snakes. Her lance was outstretched and ready, awaiting the opportunity to strike. She would make her first blow count.
The inferno lurched sickeningly with Uriel’s amusement. “You have the truth of that, at least,” the Archangel acknowledged.
“Humanity is nothing to me, much as we are nothing to our God. We are naught but vermin to be ground under heel. You should hate me, though, Kalyndriel. Hatred is all we have left to us; our last luxury in the midst of our slavery.”
As Kaly opened her mouth to refute the Archangel’s poisonous words, the surrounding wall of fire fell upon her in a burning cascade. It poured like a living lava flow, a molten viper, and it struck at her with brutal fury.
The Avenging Angel desperately raised her wings to shield herself from the blow, covering herself with her shining pinions. The blow hurled her through the air but she landed gracefully, skidding to a halt. Her wings parted and she stared fiercely into the flames.
“I have rebuked you once, betrayer!” she thundered. “And I do it once more. Show yourself, and face my justice!”
“Witness your preening righteousness, child!” Uriel roared. The inferno leapt higher and higher.
“You speak of justice as though it were real. You strut like a shining peacock, so holy, so pure! But there is darkness within you, Kalyndriel. We have both seen it. It still sleeps, waiting patiently, within your breast.”
Kalyndriel knew he spoke true, but she felt no shame. There was darkness within her, just as there was within everything: just as there could be light within Demons, an improbable nobility in the midst of damnation. Angels and Demons were no different from humanity, and no regret came with that realization.
“But my darkness did not consume me, as it did you … coward.”
“Perhaps,” Uriel murmured, his words whispering embers in the air. “But all fires burn brightly in their youth. In time, however, all flames take on the rot of the wood. The fire turns black, dreaming of ashes, and then consumes itself.”
Kalyndriel thought she caught a glimmer of motion, the hint of a titanic form behind the curtain of fire. It stood ready, its massive hands outstretched. Her eyes narrowed.
“But not this day,” she growled. Her lance flared as brightly as the North Star in the depths of Uriel’s furnace.
With a ringing howl of ferocious conviction, she launched herself toward the flickering shape. Kalyndriel’s wings roared with a fountain of blinding radiance, a holy chevron that burned brighter than the surrounding flames. The mighty Avenging Angel ripped a blazing trail through Uriel’s deceit. Her lance was a glorious point of infinite justice.
Impact.
Her vicious strike connected with Uriel’s towering form, punching through layers of armor and ephemeral flesh. Her eyes lit up with shining triumph, victorious.
That had surely been a mortal blow.
Uriel’s answering backhand crushed her armored chest plate with murderous force. It drove the breath from her lungs with an impact of such ferocity that it would have instantly slain all but the mightiest of beings. She flew bodily through the air, the orange world spinning around her in a sickening carousel.
Kalyndriel struck the ground, rolling and tumbling in a heap of shattered armor and broken wings. She slid to a halt, and it seemed as though the surrounding flames were laughing. Kaly raised her head and began to lift herself from the gr
ound, struggling to regain her breath.
She looked to the monstrous shape of Uriel in the depths of the inferno.
The flames rose, building to impossible heights … and then retreated. They slid along the ground, spiraling toward Uriel like a hurricane’s twisting winds. The dread Archangel absorbed their searing radiance into himself once more. The battlefield was clear, the air cold and crisp, and Uriel towered above the toppled columns of Stonehenge.
The Archangel Uriel, the Fire of God, looked down upon her. He was the burning mountain, the primeval Titan of brimstone. Liquid flame poured from his battle armor and the holes in his silver mask. The wheel affixed to his back was the heart of the universe.
Uriel was the Omega. He was the promise of God’s perfect condemnation. His soul was the pillar of eternal fire, the raging heart of the burning bush, and every flame in existence. He was holy incineration.
Kalyndriel looked at the hole her lance had torn in his midsection, and witnessed with horror as the wound knitted itself together with shining threads. Her heart sank, and Uriel extended a massive, gauntleted hand. A swirling mace of red-hot intensity, a maul of judgment, congealed in Uriel’s iron grip. The sledge roared with the scream of a supernova.
Uriel’s smooth mask looked down on her in a scalding deluge of wrath. “So be it!” the Archangel boomed, and his voice was the sound of oceans boiling.
“Reap the ashes of your birthright, child!”
Kalyndriel flung herself to her feet as the fiery mountain descended upon her. Uriel’s blows fell with the force a collapsing star, each one a battering ram that crashed against her. The Archangel roared solar fury. He hammered at the Avenging Angel, his wretched soul erupting in a volcano of hatred.
Kalyndriel moved with unmatched poise. She was not powerful enough to block Uriel’s blows directly, his every strike vicious enough to level a continent, but she shifted just enough to deflect them. They rang against the ground with explosions of pulverized dirt as she slid like a sunspot.
The luminous glare of her wings grew in intensity as her heart reveled in the midst of such magnificent exertion. She felt alive. Her beauty was a mask of calm concentration, her every motion refined. The arc of her blinding lance, the song of her soul, left tracers in the air as it wove a brilliant pattern.
The Fire of God and the Lance of Justice spun together in a deadly dance such as the world had never seen. They wheeled about each other like two binary stars: one enormous and hoary, burning with tired orange flames, the other tiny and impossibly bright. They lay trapped within each other’s gravity well, the irresistible pull of cruelest destiny. Only one could emerge from the dreadful embrace.
Strike.
Deflect.
Dance.
The Earth could have but one Sun, and now was the monstrous moment of its birth.
The oceans of the planet groaned in confused agony, shuddering as they were pulled between the irresistible tidal forces of two heavenly bodies. Glaciers collapsed into the boiling oceans at the thunderous report of Angelic weapons. Humanity huddled in terror at the sound of ringing impacts vibrating through the mantle of the very planet. The anvil blows resonated through their souls.
“I see the stain of revelation in your eyes, child!” Uriel bellowed. “You wake, newborn, into the suffocation of memory.”
Kaly said nothing, desperately evading his strikes. She struck at him repeatedly, but she was unable to overcome Uriel’s terrible speed. Her face was determined as she deflected deadly blows and pirouetted beneath Uriel’s furious mask.
“Orobas’ touch is upon you, Kalyndriel. Soon you, too, shall know the true weight of the ages.”
His mace descended toward her with horrible fury.
“You shall forget nothing, now. Every sin, every loss, every despair!”
Kalyndriel moved rapidly. Her lance arced upward, deflecting his blow, as she leapt toward the immense Archangel. She struck, her lance howling toward Uriel’s armored heart. It was a masterful blow: perfect, unavoidable.
Uriel reached out casually; he seized the haft of her lance as though plucking a fly from the air.
Laughter roared from the Archangel in great billows of black flame. He easily held Kalyndriel’s weapon inches from his chest. The radiant lance quivered in his massive grip, but it moved no closer. Kalyndriel growled with determination as she surged against him, struggling to drive the lance forward.
The Archangel wept lava down upon her as he held the tip of her lance tantalizingly close to his damned heart. He dropped his mace to the ground with a colossal thud and he leaned over her. He glared downward with implacable hatred.
“Is this what you want, child?” Uriel whispered. His voice was the black murmur of a guttering hearth. “Is this your fate, to be the crematorium of the eons?”
Kalyndriel struggled against Uriel’s implacable strength, her lance edging ever closer. Her spirit bled furious power, her weapon vibrating with righteous intent. This moment was hers.
“I want justice!” she bellowed, her voice a thunderclap.
“Then justice … you shall have, child.”
Release.
Uriel loosed his grip and the lance slid sickeningly into his molten heart. It pierced his treacherous essence with the ease of a nail splitting rotten wood. Kalyndriel slid forward, her lance exiting from Uriel’s back in an explosion of tainted fire.
Kalyndriel’s eyes widened in confusion.
“Now,” Uriel whispered. His voice was intimate and amused. “Revel in its bitter taste.”
Uriel laughed as he looked down at the lance piercing his ancient soul. He grasped Kalyndriel by the shoulders and raised her before his face like a delicate doll, high above the battlefield. His colossal gauntlets held her close as he stared at her through an expressionless mask. Gouts of viscous fire bled from his eyes and the hole in his heart. She met his ferocious gaze with defiance.
Uriel’s searing eyes looked into Kalyndriel’s … and she witnessed his sorrow. His silver mask disappeared.
Kaly looked into the Archangel’s soul and saw a being of impossible beauty.
How brightly Uriel had once burned, how true his soul had been. How loyally he had served his God of old, even in the depths of his doubt and despair. He had once led humanity to truth and safety, and he had once loved them, even in the midst of their disobedience. Uriel’s fire had been a thing of love, of purity. It had warmed like a welcoming hearth rather than a wildfire.
All things reach their breaking point, however. Over the course of eternity everything becomes possible, every treachery becomes conscionable; all fires become shadow, in time. The kiss of entropy comes to every flame.
Kalyndriel’s heart broke for Uriel. It also broke for herself, for she saw herself in his bleak eyes.
“Infinity awakens within you,” Uriel gasped, holding her close. Fire trickled, weak and feeble, from his dying essence. His wheel slowed. “In time, you will find yourself seated atop a radiant throne of corpses. It will grow larger and larger as the epochs devour you. There will come a day when you look back on this moment … and despair.”
He leaned toward her. “And on that day, Kalyndriel, if there is any burning ember of my soul left … I will pity you, for you will finally understand my pain.”
Kalyndriel said nothing, staring at Uriel in horror. The depths of the Archangel’s sorrow reached out to her, gripping her faith in its terrifying grasp. It was the clawed hand of despair.
“Now,” Uriel breathed in a molten whisper. “Take your precious halo … and take my cursed crown, as well.”
“May you wither beneath its terrible weight.”
Uriel’s essence flashed once, brightly, and then darkened forever.
The wheel affixed to his back slowed, and finally stopped. The Sun paused in its trek through the heavens, silently mourning its fallen father. Every spark of ignition on Earth gasped into silence. The soul of flame abandoned the universe as it left the wilting corpse of the Fire of God.
For but a moment.
The eternal fire poured into Kalyndriel with an explosive rush.
Kalyndriel froze, transfixed, as impossible warmth cascaded into her battered body. Her mouth opened in a silent scream as scorching wildfire filled her veins and poured from her eyes. Cleansing flame, the power of God’s judgment, flooded her body like a raging river.
A roar ripped from her throat.
The embrace was unbearable agony … but there was also a fierce joy within it. It sang to her of victory pyres, its melody sweet and seductive. She felt galvanized and indestructible: she was justice. Her brutal grip could crush the breath from iniquity, bending both Heaven and Hell to her withering will. She elemental and pure.
Blinding white fire poured from her like a divine pulsar. Her soul erupted into the sky, burning the clouds away, as a dazzling corona of alabaster flame blossomed above her head. It resolved into a halo fit for a Queen of Angels.
It was a seven-spoked wheel of shrieking balefire.
Her halo now returned to her, she could feel … everything. She could feel the feeble sparks of humanity huddled next to each other, trembling before the end of the world. She could feel Angels dying in a terrible battle on the other side of the world, crushed beneath cloven hooves. Kalyndriel could sense the heavenly motion of the stars and the galaxies, revolving in their celestial splendor around her burning form. Fire returned to the cosmos, each spark a tribute to her might.
Kalyndriel’s halo began to spin with the weight of the universe.
Harsh eyes of ivory looked toward Limbo. She knew she could not help Walter now … but part of her burning soul still cared for him. She sent out a searing prayer for his success. She believed in him, and she knew that he could succeed.
There was, however, something she could do.
Archangel Kalyndriel, the Fire of God, tore into the sky on empyrean wings of incandescent flame.
Chapter 39
