“Jocelin lied,” Lalael said loudly, shoving through the crowd even as they parted. “Ríel's gone. Disappeared. Vanished off the face of wherever. Where's Lucien?”
“He's disappeared, my lord. The Angel Jocelin spoke to him one day and Lucien shouted about it, and then...” Mara hesitated. “Jocelin left that day, then a few days later, Lucien said he had to find you and he went too.”
“That was three weeks ago,” Richard said softly.
“Well, he never found me... He didn't say when he'd be back?” The angel looked between Mara and the young man. The priestess shook her head.
Lalael hummed cheerfully. “Well, send out a few people to look around for him. I'm sure he's fine.”
***
Lucien remained ashen-faced and silent as Jocelin pressed the red-hot flat of the knife to his side.
“We did not want to do this deed, our love. But traitors are unclean and you must be cleansed before thou loves us.”
“Not what you were saying a while ago,” Lucien forced out from between clamped jaws.
***
“After they're out, come meet me in the office, yes? I –” Lalael uselessly gestured. “I have to tell. Someone.”
“Yes, of course, but Lalael, Andrew's been...” Mara trailed off and shared a meaningful look with Richard. “Well, he's been drinking. And he won't talk to anyone.”
Lalael nodded thoughtfully. “Where is he?”
“Kitchens, last I saw him.” The angel looked around at what used to be the main area of the church. The monastery now had thick walls, narrow windows, and large fireplaces.
“Figured out where those are?”
“Separate building, to the back. It's the only one not pouring out smoke.” Lalael looked at her quizzically. “No one's really interested in eating lately. They'll nibble on greenery from the gardens, but anything more than boiling an egg? Nothing.”
The angel nodded again. “I'll have to do something about that.” He passed his hand through the air. The walls rippled. “Yes...”
“Shall I just take you there, then, my lord?” Richard asked.
“That would be fine, thank you. Lead on. Er, wait.” Lalael looked over the crowd. “When you go out,” he began slowly, “Pay attention. He is a god; he might be exuding power or some such. Pay attention to your gut instincts. Let your intuition pull you along. Does that make sense?” The crowd murmured vaguely. “And do what feels right to your team.” Several people in the crowd grumbled. The angel looked at them sharply. “Questioning authority, are we?” The angel queried, words once again spiked with power.
“I just don't understand why we have to listen to people who don't know –”
The angel's wings burst from his shoulder blades in a feathery storm. They now, Mara noticed, were burnished with an opalescent gleam to each feather, rather than the former dusty white, although they were, as always, meticulously tidy.
Lalael looked at the naysayer, who took one glance at him and dropped his glare to the floor. “Take me to the High Priest now, Richard.”
The boy started in nervousness and wordlessly led the god-angel away.
***
They found Andrew huddled in a corner of the kitchen building, clutching a bottle of cheap liquor – one of the ones liberated from the shops. He looked haunted and gaunt.
“Andrew, sir?” Richard asked quietly.
The High Priest shivered slightly and took a slow swig from the bottle.
“Richard, leave us,” Lalael gently commanded. “Andrew, give me that,” he said, firmly taking the bottle away. Andrew made an angry protesting noise and grabbed it back.
“Can't 'ave that, 's mine,” he slurred. “M' liquor.” He coughed. “Drownin' m'sorrows, see?”
“What sorrows, Andrew?” Lalael sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him.
“Started when th' crazy angel left. Affer you did. You know Jocem – Josser – that crazy angel?” He nodded. “He's crazy. But 's not a him, y'know.” The priest's voice quavered. “Nope, not a him or a her or an it, y'know.” Another sip from the bottle. “Jus' IS, an', an' a'fore that, you went – ” The priest pointed accusingly at Lalael and tried, unsuccessfully, to focus on him. “An' Luchee – Looooshee – t'other one. 'S like you, but taller and he got...” Andrew studied Lalael's russet hair. “Dark an' curly like. He left too.”
The angel nodded encouragingly.
“Ef-ryone left,”Andrew said, sniffling. “An', an' it was like th-end all over again!” He flung his arms about, miraculously not spilling any of the drink.
“So why were you drinking?” Lalael took the bottle away.
“Eh? Hey, where'd it go?”
“It went home to its wife and two-point-five children.”
Andrew blinked muzzily at him through the drunken haze. “Nahhhhh, git outter 'ere, likker don't have kids!”
“You're right! Good show, Andrew.”
“I din't,”Andrew started, raising one index finger officiously. “I din't have nothin' after y' left, y'know, Lael-- Lalalalae--” He hiccuped. “Lord. Yer name's like tryin' to shpell Missississippi. M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-s-s–”
“That's enough, Andrew.”
The priest sniffled. “Din't have nothin'.” He said again. “There– There was no one to boss,” he ticked it off on his fingers, “And no one ter boss me. An' no one 'round that meant I oughter be there too. M'family's all dead. I din't mean nothin' when you left.” Andrew glared at Lalael.
“Well, I'm back now,” Lalael said, patting Andrew's arm.
“Y'are?”
“Of course.” The angel smiled brightly. “See me? Back home. In the flesh.”
Andrew paused warily, then grabbed the hand that was still resting on his arm and tugged sharply – Lalael fell and found himself entrapped in a tight hug.
***
Lalael stared in the crackling fire. Mara... waited. She had come into the office as Lalael had asked, without a word, yet she knew the angel had heard her. So she had sat, and she had waited. Lalael just remained sitting, motionless, elbows on his knees and chin resting on his laced fingers, studying the play of the embers.
“When I first left,” he finally said, “I went back to the battle field where I met Lucien.” The angel smiled. “He had forgotten his car after the battle. It was all covered in leaves and branches, and wthere was a nest of squirrels inside. I guess with them abandoning us and him trying to convince me to stick around, he was a bit preoccupied. Then... Then I flew, I went up and up until I couldn't go any higher, and then I called like I was at the doorstep. And called. And called. Then I prayed, which angels aren't supposed to do except in extreme circumstances.”
“Why not?” Mara asked.
“We're loud. If the power from a hundred humans praying can make as much noise as a snowfall at midnight, then one angel is more along the lines of a hurricane or a waterspout.
“Anyway,” Lalael continued, “I'd only prayed once before. Of course, I got scolded for it later. But that first time...” He shook his head as if to clear it, and went on, still staring into the fire. “Remember the other day when you and Jocelin found one of the children burning leaves with a magnifying glass? It was like that. Suddenly I was the focal point of interest of a nameless, omnipotent power that some of you call a god. I could feel all the vastness and power and... I felt the universe focusing on me. Just for a moment, I was the center of it all. That was ages and ages ago, last time I was on Earth.” Lalael stared at the fire.
“Which was when?”
“Last time the Apocalypse nearly happened. There was a lot of collateral damage over just one specific area, and I think all the humans in the two closest cities were pretty much vaporized. That was my fault. Indirectly. It was a couple thousand Earth-years ago. This time, when I prayed, I felt nothing. Not just nothing in particular, but the absence of... anything. I felt the Nothingness beyond the firmament.”
“That's what you meant by Ríel disappearing?” Lalael nodded, s
tudying her. “Wow.”
“It was like they'd abandoned me all over again. Did anyone notice I was gone? Did Shousán, omniscient and all-powerful, know I hadn't made it back? Did they care? Were they looking for me? I went back down and spent the night staring at the sky, just thinking. In the morning, I went up again, even though my wings hurt like hell for hovering that high up for so long. There was even more power up there, flying about loose, so I gathered as much as I could and I... I opened the sky.” Lalael looked back at the priestess with eerily shining eyes. “And there wasn't anything there. It was a black hole, and it was achingly dark and hungry, and it reached for me, so I closed it, and flew down, the whole time thinking that they must have misplaced Ríel.
“I didn't know what to do with myself. Ríel's gone, suddenly I realized that I really didn't have any loyalties anymore.” Lalael got up and paced slowly. “It was one thing to say I renounced them, but I'm not sure... well, obviously I didn't completely renounce them or Jocelin wouldn't have been able to convince me to go back. I think I'd been hoping they would come back one day and say something like, 'We're so sorry, we just now realized what an awful mistake we made.' I didn't have to answer to anyone, and I was lost. There's always been someone telling me what to do, something I have to do in the here and now. Obligations, duties, what have you.
“I didn't have anything to do, so I found an overhang that Lucien and I took shelter under the first night After. We'd had a fire – it was one of the first things we did with god-powers, accidentally, and it had burned for a whole day without fuel. There were still some embers. So I spent the next, what, three weeks, it's been? I spent them in my little hermitage,” Lalael laughed softly. “Thinking and drifting, until I noticed that I'd been gathering loose energy into myself.” The angel looked wonderingly at his hands. “I hadn't tried that before the day I opened the sky. I didn't even know I could. I felt powerful. The quietness around me, the mental drifting... It was like meditation, you see? Suddenly I could do things that I couldn't before.” Lalael looked at his priestess with sharp green eyes, and they sat there in silence – he glowed himself, soft but intense, and the firelight touched his skin and hair, and when Mara looked into his eyes, all the breath went out of her. Some base instinct in her recognized what he was, and Mara found herself fearful. Of him. Lalael. Her god. “I had the followers' belief before, but now I can control the power they give me. I can kill with it. I can heal. I could even make a falling apple rise,” he finished softly. “The laws stopped applying. I conjured. I created. I destroyed.”
“My lord?” Mara said in a small voice.
“And something about me changed. I became... more. My hair turned bright, my wings...” He called them out, and they lit the room so bright that Mara threw up her hands to shield her eyes. “There are things I know,” Lalael said, and his voice had become inexpressibly more – more resonant, more compelling, more... He spoke and Mara wanted to fling herself flat on the floor before him and beg for her life. “I know them, but I don't know what they are, just that they're there, waiting for a use.” Lalael put away his wings and held his hands a few inches apart, palms together. His fingertips glowed softly, then sparked across like a bolt of static electricity to a doorknob. Mara shivered.
“My lord? Do you know where Lucien is?”
Lalael looked at her in surprise, as if he forgotten she was there. “No. But I know he'll be back eventually. Like I did, he'll return. I can't keep my mind on worrying about him,” he said excitedly, eyes flashing green. “I have new, rushing power that wants me to use it and let it loose. I'm free from Ríel, and I owe loyalty to no one.”
“Why did you come back, then?” Mara asked quietly.
That gave Lalael pause. “I realized that the Higher Realm wasn't where I belonged anyway. Really knew it, for once in my life. I didn't have to even try to belong there. Even if I had opened a door to it instead of to the Void... I – This is where I'm supposed to be. It's home. I know now.” The angel sat next to her. When she flinched away, Lalael looked startled; after a moment the brightness subsided. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to overwhelm you.” He took a deep breath. “I'm tired,” he said, suddenly sounding as weary as he claimed. “Carry on as usual, bring me any urgent matters in the morning. I just want to sleep.”
“Of course, my lord,” Mara went to leave, but as she rose, Lalael caught her wrist. His eyes had faded to their normal gray, and his hair had dulled.
She felt inexplicably relieved.
“Thank you, Mara.” Something in the angel's voice told her that he meant for more than just her acceptance of his request. The god leaned close and pressed a kiss to her cheek.
As the priestess walked down the dark hall, she brushed her fingertips across where he had kissed her.
His lips had burned.
***
“We feel disappointed,” stated Jocelin. “We have lost interest in thee and thy pretty blood.”
Lucien rolled over, careful to keep his weight off the shallow cuts, mild burns, and moderate abrasions. “Well, that's it, then?” He panted, pressing his hand to the worst wound, a gash on his side and stomach that oozed sluggishly.
“Yes,” Jocelin stated simply. “We have forgotten why we wanted thee. Thou art obviously too obstinate to be of use.”
“Oh good. Can I go, then?” Limping severely, Lucien rose and collected the tattered remnants of his clothing, clutching the table with hands that were chafed to the wrist from the ropes.
“No.”
The Fallen turned back slowly.
“Thou art still a traitor and must do thy penance.”
“But you aren't interested anymore,” Lucien gasped, his side aching sharply. “And really, you weren't that good at the torture; thirteen hours and already I'm up and about? Bad form.” He braced himself against the table as a wave of dizziness, caused by notable blood loss, overtook him.
“We care not. The Nightmares will help you do your penance.”
The angel disappeared into the darkness of the warehouse with a flutter of white and a flash of gold. Lucien stood in the darkness, silent and apprehensive as the shadows and wraiths moved in close to claim him. His final thoughts before the Nightmares darkened his consciousness were a wordless, frantic panic.
***
Lalael awoke with a gasp, struggling with the sheets that had twisted about his legs. Within moments, he had stripped the sheet off the bed, thrown it about his waist, armed himself, and was striding down the corridor of the temple, noticing vaguely that it was halfway through its shape-shifting. It hadn't been Jocelin, then, or at least not entirely. When he came to Mara's door, he pounded insistently until she cracked it open.
“Mara, Lucien's in trouble,” he said urgently.
“Wha-at?” she asked around a wide yawn.
“He's afraid, he's panicking, he's hurting! Wake up and do something!”
“Did you get a vision?” she asked, now more alert.
“No, but I know. I was asleep and suddenly I was hit with this wall of fear and pain so strong I could nearly smell it.”
“Lalael, calm down. The temple isn't going to wake up and get right on it.”
“Mara,” the god said, gritting his teeth, and a little brightness came back into his eyes. “Yes. They are. Get dressed, get Andrew, get him dressed, and meet me in Lucien's office, it's got the maps in it.” Lalael ran off, trailing light, leaving the priestess standing in the doorway, stunned.
If he divided the city into parts, and then the parts into more parts, and color-coded the streets for the – No. No, that was too complicated, why send all the followers out when he could simply use what he had available to him.
He stormed past the slit windows of the monastery and came upon the wide arching windows of whatever the temple was busy turning itself into. Swinging open the glass with a thought, he climbed onto the sill and launched himself into the dark. A few moments later, he landed softly on the highest roof of the temple, a minaret that loome
d a dozen stories high. The grounds were shifting slowly as he watched, the orderly buildings merging together and the grass stretching and shifting and slotting into the rest, just so... The ruinous buildings on the edges of the temple's grounds had begun to be taken over too. Vines crawled up their sides, piles of building material surreptitiously rearranged themselves as trees and pillars and graceful arches as he watched. Slowly, Lalael thought, slowly they'd be taken in, and the shifting would creep over the ground and hills and beyond.
No sooner had he thought the word 'hill' than the ground boiled around the edges of the shifting and the castle-temple was raised higher onto one.
It was all very surreal.
Lalael fought with the power he had gathered in himself, bending it to his will, casting his mind wide over the city and searching for any whispers of the Fallen's presence.
He found nothing, but when he stopped searching, he looked down at his hands and saw that when he'd run out of his room, he'd armed himself not with his own weapons, like the Beretta he kept beneath his pillow, but Lucien's two daggers.
***
Night after night, the angel struggled with the rhythms of the world, forcing it into something he could understand, shaky though it was. Yet in the mornings, when the rosy-fingered dawn crept over the eastern horizon, he returned to the temple in disappointment.
He couldn't shake the conviction that if he was the light, then Lucien was hidden in shadow.
***
Jocelin took a final look at the Fallen before him. He was a shuddering, broken wreck, bleeding, frightened, and helpless.
“We feel detestation for thee, Fallen Angel Lucien. However, thou hast done thy penance, and thou hast been cleansed. We shall set thee free.”
Lucien looked up at the dark angel, with a spark of hope and began again: I am Lucien, and I am the light. Light banishes darkness and the darkness cannot touch me anymore, because I am the light.
Jocelin drew the knife from its sheath at the angel's waist. “We free thee, Lucien.” The angel laid a cold, golden hand on Lucien's straggled, bloody hair and – for the first time that Lucien had ever seen – smiled. “We free thee from everything. Rise, and look us in the eyes.” The Fallen found himself helpless to resist, the spark of hope igniting into a small flame, like a little candle. He looked into the angel's cold, ice-blue eyes, the angel's smiling face...
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