In the End

by Alexandra Rowland

  He'd had enough of it, and besides, the chance of rain had risen to ninety percent. He crossed the field. “Are you done yet?” he asked the angel, who was sitting on the ground, hunched over and panting.

  He looked up, eyes sparking. “I can't just leave them here.” He was apparently too tired to even snarl.

  “Why not?” Lucien asked dully. “They left you.” The angel scrambled to his feet and marched away across the field. “Where are you going?”

  “You're right! You're right, okay?” the angel spat. “I'll leave them! They left me; why don't you do the same?”

  Lucien stuck his hands into his pockets and stared after the angel as he strode towards the trees. He sighed, nudged a corpse with his toe. “You know,” he called. “Town is the other way.” He followed the angel.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Hey!” Lucien called. “You! Angel!” He stepped over a clump of roots that the angel, moments before, had nearly tripped over in his haste. “I'm glad we're heading in the right direction now and everything, but really, what's your problem? I fixed your hand.”

  “Leave me alone!” the angel shouted, stomping through the undergrowth.

  “What's wrong with you?” Lucien asked as he caught up to his companion.

  “They left me!” The angel shoved Lucien's hand off his shoulder, turned, and spat at him. “So should you!”

  “Look, two heads are better than one,” Lucien said, finally becoming impatient. “We might be able to find a way to get you back home, even with that gimpy wing that you've got now.”

  “Oh God!” The angel cried out, stopping short. “My wing! What if it's damaged permanently? What if I can't fly –”

  “Will you please shut up? I can fix your wing.”

  “You're not going to touch my wings! Demon!” he snarled.

  Lucien sighed to himself, rolling his eyes and following the angel as he scrambled over a fallen tree. “Look, I'm not exactly bouncing up and down for joy that I have to cooperate with some prejudiced twit to get what I want.”

  “Which is what, exactly? Going back to the Forsaken Lands, like I want back to Ríel? Typical.”

  “I'm glad to be out of that place!” Lucien retorted. “I didn't want to go back anyway; and now, I'm going to stay here for eternity, and as nice as that sounds, who knows what I'll do now – I'll probably have to get a job so I can eat, because magical money won't just appear out of nowhere anymore, or it won't until I figure out how it's done, and that part is going to be boring. For eternity. What if I have to work in fast food, did you ever think of that? I will die.”

  “So go do that and leave me alone!”

  “Me,” Lucien continued. “Can you imagine it? Me. Being nice to some rude, snot-nosed kid and taking food orders – food orders! – and asking if he wants frrr... No, I can't say it. And I'll probably have to wear a hairnet. A hairnet!”

  “Go away!”

  “And leave you with your sweet sorrow, I suppose? Not a chance.”

  The sky, which had been gathering darker and darker clouds, very suddenly decided to let the downpour begin. Despite the partial screen of the vibrantly green leaves overhead, the two were drenched in moments, even when the angel tucked his good wing over his head as shelter.

  “Well then. The Two Realms have forsaken us, we're exhausted and hungry, but at least it's raining and we're wet. Best day ever.” Lucien caught a few raindrops in the palm of his hand, looking up through the foliage and gazing fondly at the clouds. “But you're injured. And you don't look like you like the wet.”

  “Cold.”

  “Alright, come on, then.” He beckoned the angel along and led him in a slightly different direction than they'd been heading. “Good thing we're near the mountains, hmm? Nice cave to find somewhere. Oh, don't shiver like that, it's not that cold.”

  Eventually they found a small outcropping of rock that afforded them some protection from the driving rain. The angel had managed to collect some fairly dry twigs and leaves that had blown under the overhang before the rain hit. After a few minutes of swearing and coaxing from the angel, accompanied by running commentary and clearly unwelcome advice from Lucien, they managed to start a small fire. They sat on opposite sides of it, trying not to let the one catch the other staring.

  “So... If we're gonna be walking about for a while,” he began, “Well. Anyway, I'm Lucien.” The angel turned slightly away. “So are you going to tell me yours? I mean, if I need you, I can't be saying 'Hey angelly thing, pass the salt,' or 'Hey, you. Yeah, you with the wings,' or 'So, angelface, think it's going to keep raining?'”

  The angel, still shivering, muttered something.

  “What was that?”

  “Lalael,” the angel snapped.

  “Hmm. Lalael,” the Lucien murmured. “Of the Choir?” he asked, grinning.

  “What?”

  “Sounds like the name one of the Choir would have.” Lucien shrugged.

  “I... started out there.” Something in Lalael's voice spoke of a long-festering hurt. Lucien let the subject drop.

  “Shall I fix your wing?”

  Lalael drew away apprehensively.

  “I won't hurt you more than I have to.”

  The tense distrust still did not leave the angel's eyes. “How do I know?” Lalael asked quietly.

  Lucien sighed. “You'll just have to trust me, won't you.”

  “Trusting a demon. What would the higher-ups think.” His voice was tense again.

  Lucien got them away from the subject of anything related to Ríel. “So... wings? I saw them earlier, and the one looked pretty bad. Don't you think I should look at it? I know I'd...” Lucien paused. “Well, I think if I lost my wings, I'd probably die for not flying.”

  Lalael look startled. “You still have your wings?”

  “Of course.” Lucien chuckled.

  “Oh.” The angel blushed. “I – I thought –” he stammered.

  “You thought I was one that got... You know.”

  “Well, yes. Sorry.”

  Lucien shrugged. “No need to apologize.” He smiled wryly. “I can tuck them away as easily as you can. It's rather easy to do here, you might have noticed, and more convenient to keep them that way around the humans.”

  “I'm sorry, really, I didn't mean to presume –”

  “Never mind it, really. Want me to fix your wings now?”

  “Get away from me!”

  “That'll be a no.” Lucien heaved a dramatic sigh. “If I show you mine, will you show me yours?”

  Lalael hesitated, which Lucien took for a yes. He crossed his arms and pulled his shirt over his head, ruffling his dark curls, and shifted his shoulders as if rolling a crick out of his back. His wings appeared gradually, fuzzing into existence, fanning out from the soft, pale flesh of his shoulder blades as he stretched them out: Ashy gray, almost black at the wrist of the wing, fading to nearly white at the tips of his primary feathers. He contorted them so he could pick out a bit of tangled down from the underside of one. “There you go. They're not bat wings or anything. They're not even jet black.”

  “C-can I...?” Lalael asked tentatively. Lucien extended the other wing around the fire in a wordless motion of trust. The light caught and shone off the soft lining of the underwing with an eerie, pearly gleam. For an endless moment, the two did not move. The fire itself seemed to have frozen in time. Then Lalael ran his fingertips over the fore edge of Lucien's wing and the moment broke.

  “Going to let me fix you up now?” Lucien asked politely, tucking his wings back efficiently and vanishing them. Lalael hesitated again, clearly warring with himself, but after a moment, he nodded and quietly turned away from the fire as Lucien tugged his shirt back over his head.

  “It won't help,” he whispered, hands clenched in his lap. “It won't matter soon.”

  “Wings out, please,” Lucien said, settling on the ground behind him. Lalael manifested his wings – the tunic of the uniform had been sewn with two slits up either sid
e of his spine; the angel's wings now emerged through these. “Why won't it matter? You've only been saying that all day.”

  Lalael didn't answer for several moments. The fire crackled and danced light over the rock of the overhang. “The Most Honored Commander Michael had a plan. We all knew about it. Might have been the Zhani's idea in the first place.”

  Zhani. Lucien puzzled over this during the lull in Lalael's narrative. It was one of the three aspects of the Sko Meala, the Trebled Power, but it had been so long since any of that had mattered that he'd quite forgotten which one.

  But Lalael was continuing. “Commander Michael told us that the time had come, and all Creation was to be destroyed. Wiped off the celestial map.”

  Lucien studied the joints of Lalael's injured wing more closely. “Did he?”

  The angel wrapped his arms around himself and shivered. “He even told us how it was to be done.” A moment passed, tense with apprehension. Before Lucien could ask how, Lalael said, “It was to be some kind of an explosion, he said. The Battle was a diversion. We challenged the dishonored scum of the Forsaken Lands – we challenged Lucifer the Depraved himself. The Battle was a diversion, a sham. We slaughtered everyone who truly Believed. So we could... use it against your side. Their Belief.” The angel shuddered and hugged himself tighter. “During the battle itself, we used the fighting as a diversion so we could draw out all of it that we possibly could. From the entire world. All of it that was compatible with us. We've been cultivating it for... centuries, I guess. So we'd have enough ammunition to do what – what Michael said we were going to do.”

  Lucien had forgotten that he was supposed to be examining Lalael's wings. He sat there behind the angel, still and quiet. He knew, suddenly. He knew what was going to happen. He knew what Lalael was going to say.

  “The plan was to drain the world of all traces of the Zhani, and feed it into Síela –” another aspect of the Sko Meala, “– until it overflowed and... and it would be the rawest, most deadly form of the Power ever, and we were going to pour it back through the gate and let it loose over the world. He said it would rain down on the earth like poison; it would burn the air; it would fill the entire dimension in an instant. It would dissolve everything like acid, or infect it like a disease. The Honored Commander said this Creation would burst under the force of it.”

  Lucien reached out to touch Lalael's shoulder, then hesitated. A long moment passed. He shook his head. “Let's see what I can do with these wings.”

  “It won't matter,” Lalael whispered. “It won't matter. We're going to die soon.”

  Lucien clenched his teeth.

  ***

  Some time later, Lucien sat back with a satisfied sigh. “There, see, just this bone here dislocated and a little bit of a sprain.” Lucien said, smoothing the downy feathers at the base of one wing and straightening the scapulars. “Wasn't too terrible bad, was it? Just go easy on it for a while and you'll be alright.” Lalael pulled away and adjusted his tunic, tucking away his wings again efficiently. Lucien held up his hands and backed off. “Just asking. How did it happen, anyway?”

  “They stood on them,” Lalael said bluntly.

  “Who?”

  “Those demons. A bunch of them rushed me and wrestled me to the ground and stood on them.”

  “...Oh.”

  “And I was struggling, so one of the frog things fetched a Fallen and the Fallen was about to slash open my throat, when someone else came and fought them off. Just like Arael would have.”

  “Who's Arael?”

  “She... one of my...” Lalael's shoulders slumped. “My friend. She was... She was just Arael. Always laughing, red hair, blue eyes. She was one of the choir. Some of them signed up for the infantry at the last minute. In all the rush, I don't know if she...” Lalael failed to notice Lucien's shiftiness. “She'll be wandering around the Gates or the Silver Court, wondering where I am.” Lalael's laugh was strange. “She'll forget about looking for me after a week or so. She's a bit absent minded. I mean –" here Lalael looked at Lucien eagerly, "– her memory's unparalleled, it's the little tasks she forgets about. And... she's busy. Popular, you know?"

  "Well, there's no point in worrying about her," Lucien said. The skin up his spine prickled. "Until you get back to Ríel."

  Lalael's face suddenly darkened, and a sullen silence settled over them.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lalael had never really thought much about what the inside of a demon's home would look like, but if he had, he certainly wouldn't have imagined that it contained a cat. So the cat was, in fact, called Antichrist, which made up for it, but it was soft and didn't seem terribly vicious: When Lucien had opened the door, the cat had come running out of another room yowling and wound around his ankles until he'd stumbled.

  Admittedly, the name was not as surprising as the fact that there was indeed a living animal living with a supposedly evil demon. Lalael had always had the impression that demons only kept animals around for sacrifices to their infernal leader. After a mere few hours in this particular demon's lair, the only sacrifices Lalael had seen had been made to the cat itself, amid alarming noises from the cat and equally alarming wheedling from Lucien while he worked the can opener.

  It puzzled Lalael, this cat. And the situation, come to think of it. One of the many questions that plagued the angel's broody thoughts was why Lucien seemed so... well, nice. None of the other angels had been this nice, in all the thousands of years that he had lived in Ríel. Well... There had been a few, back in the early years. Before Lalael had been – but no. There was no point in dwelling over thoughts such as that these days. Why was Lucien so... tolerating? Patient? Generous? He had opened his lair to the angel with only one question: Was Lalael allergic to cats?

  So why didn't he seem to be homicidal? Why did Lalael never happen to look up to see a dangerous, murderous glint in the demon's eyes? Was Lucien lulling him into a false sense of security? Simply watching him walk sometimes nearly proved Ríel's point.

  Lucien seemed the incarnation of the hedonistic pleasures that the Archangels adamantly forbade, the things that Michael had shouted about in angelic boot camp, so to speak, the things that Raphael had told them caused horrible injuries and festering illness when Lalael had been in the healing department... Lalael could almost see in Lucien the sin that the Archangels were constantly preaching about, curling and twisting under that thin covering of skin, all seven of them.

  To be frank, it freaked Lalael out.

  So did the cat.

  Still, Lalael reasoned to himself, he had been trained to hate and be suspicious of demons, so no one could expect him to just trust Lucien after three days... Right? Even if Lucien hadn't taken the chance to rip off his wings when he had it. And the whole "not wanting to fight" thing? That didn't help Lalael feel comfortable either. It was unnatural.

  Demons were supposed to be vicious and bloodthirsty; it was one of the Facts Of Life. The world was not a rational place without them. The angel realized, upon reflection, that he'd feel a lot more safe if Lucien (or, failing that, at least his cat) tried to kill him, just once. Or make him Fall. Or something equally alarming. But he didn't.

  And so, Lalael suspiciously skirted around the demon when they were in the same room, talked as little as possible, and never ever turned his back. They spent their days in Lucien's flat, the demon in his bedroom, and the angel in the guest room that Lucien had generously (and suspiciously) gifted to him.

  "Stay as long as you like!" Lucien had said. "I enjoy the company."

  Did he even know that there were Facts of Life to adhere to?

  Everything freaked Lalael out. Well, alright, not everything, but almost everything that was in Lucien's lair.

  “Don't go outside. Never know what those humans will do under pressure.” Lucien had said, with cheerfully ominous tone.

  “What pressure?” Lalael had asked.

  “Oh, you don't think,” Lucien had said in surprise, “that an Apocalypse
and half of the world's population vanishing in the space of five minutes counts as pressure? Everyone has lost a friend or a family member or someone they knew. A neighbor. An enemy.” Lucien's voice became sorrowful, “The man behind the counter at the bakery that sells those really amazing cream things, and the jelly danishes –”

  “I don't know what those are. What's the point?”

  “I won't get jelly danishes on Tuesdays, that's what,” Lucien had said in despair. He'd completely lost the thread of the conversation.

  Lalael had left him at the window. “I'm going outside.”

  ***

  Lalael had gone Outside, and Outside was currently where he was. Uneven cracks laced the streets like a spider's web stretched over the asphalt. A few of the smaller boulders – brimstone that had stopped burning – scattered the bigger web of streets that ran through the city. Lucien had been rather uneasy about Lalael going out on the streets, and, the angel thought, demons (like everyone else) were interested in staying alive. So he had gone the other way, to the roof of the building. With greater knowledge of the humans, Lucien might actually know what he was talking about when he warned Lalael not to go outside.

  The power throughout the city was down, so Lalael had trudged up fifteen flights of stairs from Lucien's third floor apartment. The wind whipped his hair in his eyes, and tugged on the strange human clothes – which were stolen.

  They had gotten back to the apartments, and Lucien, after feeding that damn cat, instead of going straight to his room and blockading the door, had cheerfully tripped out the door and up the stairs and looted – yes, looted – his neighbors. The ones that had vanished without a trace. You could tell which were gone, the demon had said, because a certain smoky scent rather like incense lingered around their doorways. Some of the doors stood ajar, as if their occupants had been fleeing.

  And Lucien had asked, from around an armful of clothes and food, “Can't your people manage to go through the end of the world neatly?”

  That had annoyed him, and he had upped the intensity of the Not Speaking to the demon. But then Lucien had shown him to his room, and shoved most of the nice clothes that he was carrying into Lalael's arms with a cheerful, “Don't want to go around wearing armor now, do you?”