Chapter 31 #3
In Heaven, Phanuel was in the barracks, seated, gnawing on the inside of his cheeks, eye following the figure of Michael as he approached the exit at the other end of the hall.
He’d been listening to the chief prince and the devil, but he hadn’t caught any of the noises that he did that first time his friend had entered with nothing more than a fruit.
In other words, he hadn’t heard them fuck again, but perhaps they had chosen to sin more quietly today.
The events from before the war for Heaven were so distant that he could hardly remember them, but while listening, he’d suddenly thought of the parties that Lucifer would host in Michael’s home, and how the two had been so inseparable, how they would sit with their legs tangled without shame in front of all the angels.
Nostalgia should have struck at him, and yet it didn’t.
He found himself unable to enjoy any of those memories, as if he’d been silently miserable.
Michael may be a prisoner of nostalgia, but Phanuel wasn’t.
Michael stopped with one foot already outside, the brilliance of Heaven pouring in. He, softly, said: “I will be with God.”
Phanuel whispered, “You always are.”
The chief prince said nothing in return, but his shame may as well have crept out from his back like a pair of wings, one of his seraphic six. Breathing in slow, Phanuel watched the door shut. He moved to lock it, afterwards, as he’d always been instructed to do.
At the open gates of Heaven, Rosier stared up at the eternally tall pillars of pearl, then at each of the twelve precious stones that adorned the walls.
Like fog, clouds were at the feet of all the horses, and as Baal rode in quickly, swinging his mace at the nearest angel, one only adjusting a pebble, to have his morning star bash at his head.
Its teeth jabbed into the side of his jaw, then pulled back enough to rip out some skin, some bone — throwing the stranger to the ground with a gurgled yell.
Rosier, holding the reins with Asmodeus behind him, avoided the sight even when the horse beneath trotted forward, not allowing Rosier the chance to lag behind as he’d done in the water.
Unwillingly, he saw Heaven. ‘Home.’ But, unwillingly, he saw no such home.
Rifle cocked in his hands, Asmodeus lifted his chin, craned his neck, counting each simple house they passed and every new cathedral that hadn’t been there when they lived here.
No angel can memorize Heaven — it resists — but the oldest had come very close.
As an angel, Asmodeus had familiarized with all the most important faces of it, and its whims, and he’d had a rough count of the amount of things relative to other things, however much that changed each second.
There had been more homes, more bathhouses, more galleries, more observatories, than there’d ever been places to worship.
Angels had almost never worshiped before Lucifer, who taught them to adore it, to adore God.
How to be thankful when you’d never known life without pleasure?
‘What have they done with you, Heaven?’ he thought as he aimed the rifle at some angels trying to hurry into their homes in confusion.
Before Rosier could stop him, he pulled the trigger, grunted at the recoil against his fragile shoulders.
Angels couldn’t drop dead, but a bullet could still pierce, could still throw them back to splatter red from the back of their bodies against a wall. Angels could still scream and run.
For Baal, there was something so amusing about this — firearms in Heaven.
They did little more than brandish them, and swords and maces were far more enjoyable to torture with, but he liked how the poor heavenly host seemed so distraught.
How little they must’ve known of humanity far advancing them.
Taking a torch from the top of a stand on the street, Baal flung it at the first wooden house that he passed, angels scattering away like insects, like humans.
‘Poor things,’ Baal thought in the same voice that Satan always said it in.
‘Sheltered little children.’ Michael and his soldiers already saw what the world had become — but all these angels who never left their Father’s dollhouse?
They must’ve thought Earth was as it’d always been because Heaven was as it’d always been.
Behind the regent of Hell, the demons were all starting their own fires, galloping past to swing axes and send any nearby angels to the ground, and when an angel dared to raise a sword, they lifted rifles.
There was no time for the tortures they’d invented during Satan’s first rebellion, but demons still looked for eyes to pierce with the ends of their blades and they grappled hair and dragged angels on the back of their horse, then trampled them into a grotesque sludge of bone and crushed meat — still screaming, unable to die no matter what broke.
But as the demons reached the very heart of Heaven — a shadow loomed above, the only armored angel that had remained in paradise as Earth’s apocalypse took place.
Great wings spread out behind him — Michael, sword and chain in hand.
At the sight, Baal unfolded his own wings, struck them hard enough to raise his body off his horse, to bring him halfway toward the chief prince.
The silence between them was brief, and faint; clink, clink — they both twirled their wrists to lasso their chains.
And the regent said, “Your city burns, prince.”
“It is Hell that burns,” hissed the archangel, who didn’t waste another second before whipping out the golden links that snapped against nothing when Baal instantly swerved to the left, “and you will burn with it!” Baring his teeth beneath the helmet, snarling, Michael swung once more, but again, the demon flew out of the chain’s way.
“Abomination! Beast! Demon!” Baal laughed, so quick in the air that his voice seemed to trail behind him with the breeze that circled around the prince who, grunting, then flew after him.
He continued to throw out his chain, heart thudding harder and harder, but when Baal sharply turned, Michael stuttered and twisted inelegantly, frantically swinging blindly in the direction Baal had gone.
‘God rebuke you,’ Michael thought, so angry that he shook, ‘damned angel of flight.’
“No,” Rosier was whispering, watching the battle from a street away, the street where he’d once lived.
“Michael is going to rip him to pieces.” He was panting, trembling, as the fires in the city swelled and multiplied.
Their horse was walking slow beneath them, passing by homes that should have felt familiar but didn’t.
‘Home hasn’t been home for a long time, has it?
’ There was a hole in his heart, and it was dually tragic and comforting to know that there was nothing to fill it now, nothing to look for, nothing to hope for.
Asmodeus lifted his head, and then he chuckled — “He’ll never catch Baal.”
Indeed, the regent flew upward steeply, watching again with a victorious grin as the prince fluttered his wings to stop, his chain extending to grapple at empty space as it kept, kept, doing.
Baal could still hear the devil in his head: Satan, Lucifer, taking his hand, curling it into a fist, telling him, ‘Fight with your strengths. You have some, don’t you?
If you ever wrestle with Michael, he’ll win with brute force. ’
‘I have a strength,’ Baal had said quietly. ‘I can fly. I taught you— I taught you to fly.’
Satan had stared, then squeezed Baal’s fingers and replied, ‘Then fly.’ And then he’d kissed him slow.
A whistle. Baal shouldn’t have looked, but he did, gaze flickering in its direction, and he saw Phanuel, on top the rounded ceiling of a temple, looking perplexed, frightened, even when he lifted a hand to point at a stone, long building some roads away.
He mouthed something, a name. It might’ve been Lucifer, or Satan, or maybe Baal’s own, but he heard the clink of the chain, threw out the one of his mace in panic.
Just in time — his chain tangled with Michael’s, twisted then knot tight between them, but as it did, the morning star at the end of Baal’s weapon swung about, then struck hard at Michael’s wing, sending him back as the feathered appendage folded backward with a bloody crack.
Gasping in the pain, Michael plunged, and as he did, he grasped at the air like he’d find the hand of God to take, to keep him from falling — but the Lord hadn’t done that even for His favorite angel.
And so Michael hit the ground. Heavily, hard, it was enough for a sea of blackness and pain to flood him instantly, to hear the thuds of his armor banging against his strained muscles.
Twitching, he tried to twist around, to stagger onto his feet but the throb in his wing jerked all of him, and he let out a noise of agony like a groan.
He stumbled, he kept moving, he tried not to look at all the angels, those who stared at their prince, just defeated.
Chimes rattled in his ears, and Michael tried to reach for his sword once he realized he’d dropped his chain.
Looking up — ‘Baal.’ He saw a blurry, golden sky without him, the regent of Hell.
“Michael!” shouted an angel. “They’re heading for the barracks!”
The spinning world around Michael stopped, and he reeled in a cold breath, and he looked in the direction of the barracks.
“No—” he rasped. “Stop them—” He instinctively stretched his wings only to hiss, flap the one that worked behind him without meaning to, pushing him onto the fountain that, just some days ago, he’d brought Satan to.
‘Satan.’ “No,” he seethed. “Don’t let them into the barracks.
Don’t let them take the devil!” ‘His mouth had tasted perfectly like Lucifer’s, as soft and plump and sweet and maddening.
Venom. Liquor. Eucharist. Wine. Lucifer’s mouth like liquor.
He was with me again, for a second. Lucifer.
His sin, his arousal. Tempt me again, please.
Tempt me again. Lead me down to Hell, and let me burn for you.
’ “Don’t let them in!” he panicked as he dragged himself closer and closer.
‘I kissed you, and I regretted it all. For a moment, I did. I should have fallen with you. Cast me down with a kiss. The kiss of death. Sin. I regret it all.’
Two angels, those not too ashamed of their desecrated prince, went to help him, grabbing his body, keeping him upright, as he looked at the sight of the barracks — the door perfectly unlocked, wide open.
Phanuel, standing calmly beside it. The prince couldn’t look all the way inside, but he knew that Satan was gone.