Part Four | Apocrypha For God so loved the world . . . Azrael
Part Four | Apocrypha
For God so loved the world . . .
Azrael
A weeping God isn’t something you forget.
I pace outside Heaven’s throne room like a caged animal, prowling in the spaces between stars. A silent observer. That’s the role He gave me. The role I never fucking asked for.
And tonight, I hate it. I hate all of it.
The sound of His cries aren’t thunderous. They’re quiet. Like a nail carved through flesh.
Tonight, Heaven bleeds sorrow. The kind of pain that doesn’t wash off easily. He stares down at that godforsaken hill, at Golgotha’s crucifix.
But it isn’t that son who deserves His tears.
The one who died willingly.
I tear into His throne room, unable to stop myself, furious, seething. God kneels on the marble steps, His hands trembling, His eyes heavy with tears. The sacred drops pour down His face, carving silent rivers into the ground, but I’ve stopped mistaking His tears for truth.
His tears mean nothing to me.
Just like His fucking promises.
As I approach, His shoulders tense. Like He expected my rage, even before I came here. He’s stripped bare, raw and exposed, a father losing not one son, but two, broken in ways even the stars can’t carry. The architect of all things is crumbling in grief.
But as far as I’m concerned, He can fucking wallow in it.
I swallow, voice rough. “You swore this wasn’t the end.”
“It isn’t.” He shakes his head. “This is how he’s redeemed.”
Lucifer, he means. The love of my entire existence.
The one who just ripped out my heart down in Gethsemane like it was nothing.
Like I didn’t even matter.
Like he and I didn’t mean . . .
I shake my head, rage coiled tight in my fists. “He’s fallen too far. You have to end this. You swore to me.” I let out a guttural growl, my anger barely leashed.
But I’m not scared of this Fucker.
I’ve ended greater gods for less.
“You think he’s lost?” He asks over His shoulder, voice suddenly cold. He doesn’t turn to look at me.
My ribs tighten slightly. “Even I can’t bring him back. Not from this.”
From locking him in a cage. He’s going to be furious when he gets out.
God scoffs. “You underestimate love.”
“Or maybe I just no longer trust this.” I gesture between us. “This pact. This vow I swore. You said he’d be redeemed. Said he’d know mercy. Said that one day he’d be . . .”
Mine.
I can’t bring myself to say it.
It feels too much like a lie now.
Like an impossibility wrapped in divine promise. What He calls a blessing.
I huff, throwing my head back with a hollow chuckle. Lucifer was right. This Fucker was never going to keep His word to me.
Not when those words were carved from my sacrifice.
My response is quiet. More revealing than I want it to be.
“I’m the end. What good am I to the living? What chance do I have in keeping him?”
Down below, the Nazarene shudders and then his head falls, his crown of thorns bleeding.
God sighs. “You keep him because you believe he can be more than what he’s been.”
“You mean more than you made him to be.” I scoff. “I’m tired of believing in broken things. Tired of carrying promises that feel like chains.”
“Then let them weigh on you.” His voice echoes off the edges of the cosmos with His fury, then softer, “You’re the only one who can carry this.”
I lift my chin in challenge. “And if I don’t?”
He steps closer, and the air thickens, dense and pulsing like the moment before a supernova. My fists clench as gravity bends around Him, like the universe itself is bracing.
But I meet his gaze head-on, eyes narrowed in fury.
Locked in a soundless war with the shape of mourning that still holds the stars in orbit.
“Would you risk a different end?” he asks.
Than the one where Lucifer’s mine, the one where he and the woman he’ll come to love, the one who isn’t even a thought yet, choose me, see me as no one ever has before.
He turns away, already knowing the answer.
I smother a flinch.
“Keep thy faith, Azrael. Keep thy faith, and I shall unbind their fates, and then you shall have love everlasting.”
I lock my jaw and stare past Him, into the burn of a sky that won’t stop bleeding.
Every part of me wants to rage, to scream, to refuse.
I draw in a breath that tastes like blood and ash. My jaw locks. My wings twitch like they want to tear at something, anything.
But my refusal won’t save him. And neither will my pride.
The Creator asks for faith, but all I have left is grief shaped like obedience.
And a rage sharp enough to cut Heaven in half.
“For him, I’ll carry it. Even if it kills me.”
He nods. “I know.”
I laugh, bitter and quiet, because I’ve seen what Lucifer has become—a ruin, a shadow of what he once was. “Beginnings shouldn’t look like this. Not when everything’s burning.”
God’s face hardens, distant, fixed on that hill far below.
The cross that stands silhouetted against a bloodred sky.
He nods, slow and heavy. “I made a promise to him, to all of creation, that even in darkness, there will be light.”
“Then what do I do?”
Lightning fractures. In the distance, the Nazarene gasps his last breath. God’s shoulders flinch—not from surprise, but from pain older than time.
But He chose this.
And I did too.
Over and over again.
The silence thickens, and an unspoken command hums.
And something in me shifts.
“So, I carry this burden. Alone.”
I know it’s the truth before I even say it.
I’m Death. Destroyer. Reaper. Ender of Worlds.
But I’ve become something else too. The keeper of a fragile hope. The bearer of a secret too heavy for even the highest angels to bear.
“You won’t be alone. I’ll be with you. And near the end, so will she.”
I feel it then. The tremor beneath all things, the faintest pulse of something not yet born.
Lucifer’s redemption.
I lift my gaze, past the weeping God, past the aching stars—to the place where his fate waits. For the moment I know he needs.
And I vow to see it through.
Because even in Hell, even in ruin, there’s promise.
And I’m the one who keeps it.
Through silence and exile.
Through every broken vow and whispered lie, I carry the weight of His mercy in my chest like a secret blade.
Unseen, unheard.
Until the day the devil himself can bear it.
This is my truth. This is my burden.
That even in a world where angels fall and gods weep, a thread of hope remains.
And I bear it. Alone.
For him.