Chapter Seventeen #3
Silas folded his arms on the balcony, shifting his weight forward.
I waited for him to impart wisdom, or to guess what was on my mind, but he didn’t.
He stayed quiet, listening to the cars, the tires, the horns, the buzz of city life below.
His eyes were fixed in the middle distance, mouth pressed into a line as he watched nothing and everything at once.
I looked over my shoulder into the muted dark of the room, then back at him. “It’s not easy for me, either,” I said.
He continued to look forward, but his mouth turned down.
“I grew up terrified of going to Hell. It was a threat. Whenever I did something my parents didn’t like, they told me I’d broken God’s heart.
I had to be the only seven-year-old shivering with existential anxiety over what would make a deity feel good or bad.
But…I’m human. To know that angels are my main threat?
That they’re the ones I’m running from?”
He looked at me.
“I have to imagine that however bad my blasphemy is—my unforgivable sin—I’m still human. It’s not like an angel, specifically crafted to serve and worship. Yet Hell is full of fallen angels. And the Watchers from the book of Enoch—”
His eyebrows lifted.
“Yes, I reread it last night after you mentioned you were in it. They’re…
well, they’re not being pulled apart for eternity.
They aren’t exactly Prometheus chained to a rock with their guts gobbled by an eagle or whatever.
And if a being specifically crafted for worship still exercises their free will and gets out alive, why do we, as mortal beings with agency, live in fear of having our eyeballs plucked out and our flesh peeled off and…
” I lost my train of thought to fire and brimstone.
“Because fear is an effective tactic,” he supplied. “Telling you not to do something because it makes a deity sad is more effective than asking you to do something because it makes them happy.”
I watched the ant-sized humans on the sidewalk nearly fifty stories below. I squished them with my thumb, one by one. “Is that all it is? Psychology for behavior modification?”
He rotated his body fully toward me. “I don’t want to do this with you, Marlow.”
I stopped squishing the ants, uncomfortable cortisol entering my bloodstream. I straightened my spine and faced him.
His brows bunched. His voice wasn’t unkind, but it also held no warmth as he said, “I don’t want to play coy about theology.
You’re so far past subtleties. You’re about to set the world into a tailspin.
And the small details are an important step, but they’re steps so far before this one.
I know you’re the human, but you’re steering the ship right now.
I’m following your script, quite literally.
I fall today, Marlow. In five hours, it’s all over for me.
Not just a human lifetime. Every lifetime. ”
He was blindly following me, and I was leading him off a cliff.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say more. I’m sorry for sleeping with you and then pretending like it never happened. I’m sorry for damning you. I’m sorry you ever had the misfortune of meeting me. I’m sorry for everything.
We stared out at the haze that obscured the red, sunbaked mountains.
“Tell me something,” he replied.
I shrank, gripping the balcony.
“Are you doing the right thing?”
I inhaled sharply. “Yes,” I said after a beat.
“Why?”
My grip tightened. I searched his face, hoping his question was rhetorical. I moved my weight from one foot to the other, but I did not break his gaze. Staring into his eyes, I understood the importance of my answer. I couldn’t lead a war without a clear directive.
“Because masquerades are cruel and unfair, and we don’t deserve to live in a world where they’re the norm.”
This answer caught him off guard. He tilted his head ever so slightly, gold-brown hair tufting in the heat gusting off the sands below.
“You can’t run on a platform of free will if it’s a lie.
It was problematic when the free will was ‘you have free will to run into a vat of acid or into a cloud full of gold and mansions and joy.’ It’s more problematic when you realize that not only is there no vat of acid, even for their angels, but that the cloud is just more servitude.
Heaven isn’t paradise. It’s a labor camp. ”
He had no response, and I wasn’t done talking.
“I always used to think that Milton had a quotable fallacy,” I said.
Silas pressed his lips into a line.
“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. You’ve heard it, right?
But my take was built on a very specific understanding of what Heaven and Hell were.
And if all of the rebellious angels are still rocking and rolling even in Biblical texts—Apocrypha or no—I’m struggling to see where we’ve based our understanding of the afterlife.
So, when it comes to why I’m leading the war? ”
He waited expectantly.
“Because even if we end up chained to a rock with a bird eating out our liver, I want it to be something we chose. I want free will. Not the illusion of it. Not the pretend version where one choice is absurd and unfathomable. The real thing. Free will isn’t real if it requires one path that you can’t deviate from.
And a world stuck to that standard isn’t a fair world.
Not for us, and not for the other people whose gods rule with an iron fist. And maybe we need anarchy to achieve that. ”
“Order from chaos?” he prompted.
“Chaos from chaos.”