Chapter 41
From the head of the Leviathan, Rosier and Armoni saw the state of the Earth.
The sea serpent traveled Babylon — eerie, calm, crushing everything beneath its slithering body of coils and tough scales.
Gripping at some of the horned skin at the top of the Leviathan’s skull, the demon and the angel noticed buildings sunk into themselves, the fires of Hell breaching through cracks in the Earth to swarm at all the people, the good and wicked alike, if such a division existed.
Abandoned children, elders, the weaker — and he remembered Asmodeus once saying, ‘Haven’t you seen enough to know that humanity is a lost cause?
We demons made war, but it’s men that created atrocity.
The things they’ve done to one another, Rosier — you’ve seen it.
How can you forgive it? How can you keep believing in their goodness?
’ ‘I don’t know,’ Rosier had whispered as he leaned against him.
‘But I keep believing, despite myself, despite them. Their evil wouldn’t hurt so terribly, Asmodeus, unless they were kind.
It’s because we know they’re good that their wickedness is so painful. ’
In the distance, bullets battered against something, and a sharp cry was cut off, a whining animal somewhere. Dark birds flew about aimlessly, all of them like vultures, eyeing the dead.
But Rosier’s own eyes were empty now, and he continued to play with the fingers of Asmodeus’s corpse arm, resting in a sling across his torso.
Long ago, Rosier would carry Asmodeus’ head this way.
After they had fallen from Heaven, after Rosier had decapitated him — he had pieced Asmodeus together again. His friend, his husband, his demon.
“Rosier,” Armoni called for what must’ve been the hundredth time.
“Rosier, please listen to me.” But the demon of fruit continued his silence.
“What now? Where are we going?” Armoni’s voice was forcibly raised by the clamor of death that they drowned in.
“Rosier.” Rosier didn't turn, and yet he felt the gaze of his friend land on Asmodeus’ hand, like how one might feel eyes on the back of their own neck.
‘It’s the same,’ Rosier thought, ‘because Asmodeus is my body. We were one. We were one body.’ Armoni said: “I fear the Leviathan is taking us to the Beast.” He remembered the soldier, Dante, who’d spoken to Asmodeus in their cage about the boy-turned-monster he’d fought before falling into Hell. “We’re heading toward… a border.”
Rosier almost had to ask what border, where to. He wished he could stand at the border of death and see his husband on the horizon. “There is nowhere to turn back to,” he whispered.
“We shouldn’t involve ourselves, Rosier, in this apocalypse.”
‘But we’re damned,’ Rosier thought, ‘and fire and darkness awaits us. I would like to be dead. To be with him, I’m not afraid of death now.’
Above — the sound of feathers, and both Armoni and Rosier lifted their heads to see a couple angels, but they were fleeing upward, returning home. At the head, two horsemen led the way, one over a white horse and one over a black horse.
“They’re abandoning the Earth now,” Armoni whispered.
Rosier didn’t reply again. He could understand them. He’d done the same — fled Satan’s tower, fled the war, fled everything. He watched the angels run away quietly, almost peacefully, though he recalled how he'd pressed to Asmodeus as the demons attacked God's city.
When those fleeing ones far above reach Heaven, they'd find devastation, as there was below.
But not yet. Gabriel and Raphael would, will, lead the army past the gates.
Gabriel will realize he never did blow the seventh trumpet.
He hadn't done it before or after the spread of sickness had finally turned Raphael against the apocalypse.
The two princes will plead with God. But not yet.
Right now, the angel Dina was landing behind the slumped anti-Christ, his pale wings open but bent behind him, almost flared.
He, abruptly, missed the lace he always hid his hair beneath, he missed his angel robes, he missed Uriel's library house he never stopped wandering, he missed rings on his fingers, he missed Heaven and being an angel and he missed youth.
‘I'll have it back. And it will all be better.’ He stared at Tadeo, crumbled on the ground, heaving, naked body trembling.
‘I will sacrifice you to do it. I must. There is no other choice.’ “Ta…de…o,” the angel sounded out as if it was the first time he's said it.
His voice was like a siren's hum, and he maintained it even through all the noise of war. “You've lost your friend.”
“Don't… come near me,” Tadeo whispered, shifting away from his mother and her wheelchair.
“Don't… you dare come near me.” Turning his head halfway, his only eye was bloodshot and wide, pupil thinned into a pinprick.
“This is all because of you.” He exhaled through flared nostrils.
“All of this is because of you.” His body was beginning to tremble, and the more he turned, the more he exposed the hole in his head, perpetually bleeding, pulsing.
“I'll kill you. I'll tear you to fucking pieces for what you've done.”
‘Tell him that he—’ Apsinthos began, but Dina knew what to say.
“I didn't kill her,” the angel replied, and he recalled Satan emphasizing that he wasn't responsible for Tadeo's rape and murder. “Angels in the sky did. And it wasn't me that killed Dante, or your family. No, that was soldiers. That was Babylon.”
In an angry, bewildered echo, Tadeo said, “Babylon?”
Dina glanced upward, and he listened to the hiss of the silver birds above, the drones, and he allowed the yells and the terror of families huddled to die together, the remnants of colorful town streamers on the ground, the blood, the tears, the begging, the useless fight back, to fill Dina with the most dread he'd ever felt.
‘The world is depraved. The world is beyond saving.’ “They won't stop.
They won't stop killing. Since you were young, all you've known is this.”
“Stop,” Tadeo said, teeth visibly grit. “Stop.”
“They’ve hated you for centuries. Your people were sacrificed to the gods of wealth and the gods of hate.
Your land was gutted for a bridge into the mouth of empire.
You fought to be free, and the world turned to make ruin of you instead.
And they, in Babylon, are rejoicing now — can’t you hear them?
— and they, in all the other parts of the world who have even known of this place, rejoice.
All the criminals of you, the infestation of you.
They pray for all the little children here, who will grow into demons, to die a thousand deaths, mutilated for all the sins of your blood. ”
“Stop!” Tadeo shouted, then he twitched and twitched. But he was still covered in his family's blood, in Joana's blood, in Dante's. Joana's family must already be dead. Dante's family must be dead.
“Be angry,” Dina urged him. “Be angry! The world loathes you! You tried to do good, and the world wanted you dead! Even your own family wanted to use you! They would never accept you! You resurrected, you fought for your liberation, and it meant nothing to this cruel world!” The anti-Christ let out a harsh breath of fright, of anger.
“Look above you, Tadeo! Look at what this world did to those you love!
It's a rotten world! It's a damned world!”
“You,” Tadeo whispered. “This is all because of you—” It was becoming a chant.
“Because of you.” Beneath the skin of his knuckles, a sudden dull pain called, as if he were bruised, and this sensation balled in his chest, blooming and blooming until it began to squeeze at his lungs, force them empty of air.
Dina thought of his first memories, of dancing, of wanting to be beautiful. “This is because of them.” Babylon. “And even with divinity flowing through your veins, you failed to bring down the empire of evil. All you can do now is destroy it.”
When talons burst out from Tadeo’s knuckles, the tips of his fingers, the sides of his palms, his wrists — sharp pain brought him a taste of relief.
He couldn’t resist, then, to dig his talons into his own arms, tear through his own muscle — the skin, the muscles, the pale pink layer, then the sharp red.
Only hurting himself could he breathe, only hurting himself could he maintain himself here.
There was so much pain inside him, and he wanted to rip it out, brandishing his own suffering like a whip.
But he lifted his burning gaze, and he felt more eyeballs bubble open along his body.
He saw his mother, breathing carefully in her chair, and he saw Lupina holding the skewered remains of Joana, and he saw tanks, he saw drones, saw every burning, crumbled building, every ball of light.
The ground rumbled; was it the war or was it him? Was Tadeo the war? Are we the war?
“Can you feel it,” Dina whispered, “now?” The angel felt it in his own heart — the rage.
The rage of being born too late to know what it was all like before the war.
He shouted, “End it! End it, Tadeo.” ‘Take me back,’ Dina wanted to say.
‘I want to know what it was like. I want to know what paradise was. I want to be happy. I don’t want forgiveness; I want to have never done it; I want to go back.
I want to be free from sin, not forgiven for it.
Take me back. Please let me go back and do it all right this time. It’s not fair.’