Chapter 2 Present Aeon #2
“Well, we’ve finished listening.” Michael turned to him. “While you were doodling childish fantasies yet again, some of us were dealing with the serious business of this Council. Now…do we have a problem, or shall we move on?”
“This could bring the Creator’s attention back to us. You know it could.”
“And if it does not?”
“If it does not, then at least it may hide His absence better.” Luc made his last-ditch attempt. “It may distract—”
“Distract us from our very necessary labors to keep our world intact?” Michael’s eye twitched. Luc had poked at him now. “What the common angels need is order. Stability. Normalcy, not distraction,” Michael admonished. “You would plunge them into chaos.” His fist came down on the table. Hard.
A few of the Council members shifted in their chairs. They wouldn’t meet Luc’s eyes, but they weren’t looking at Michael either. Arguments were common enough in these meetings. However, no one challenged Michael, the head of the Council, the final word of it, as often and as tirelessly as Luc did.
Cowards.
Luc sneered and spat, “What’s your issue, Michael? Too many borders for your warriors to handle?”
“I dare say there would be! More worlds mean more opportunities for the Void to encroach. And if you think that is a trivial matter, that only shows how young and foolish you are!”
Simmering with irritation, and no little humiliation, Luc glowered at Michael.
He didn’t know why the older angel had let him onto the Council in the first place; he always did this.
He always cut Luc’s projects off at the proposal stage, declaring them frivolous or childish or irrelevant to the important matters at hand.
Luc had yet to win a unanimous vote on anything, despite having had several projects approved by the majority.
And this was supposed to be it—this had to be the reason he’d been created! The reason he’d been put on the Council! If not this project he’d been tirelessly working on since his time in lessons, then what could it possibly be?!
Luc said nothing; he barely swallowed his rage like he’d been trained to do after an aeon. When he remained silent, not affording Michael an answer, but not interrupting him either, Michael turned back to the others and began detailing his plans for reinforcing Heaven’s current borders.
“We have to make it harder,” he urged, “for anything—or anyone—to slip through the cracks.”
Luc returned to his house in a heightened state of fury.
Most of the Council members had their houses built as palaces for entertaining; in comparison, Luc’s home was quite simple, more a workshop than a house.
A flat, rectangular, one-story building with white stone walls and blue trim, this was where Luc’s ideas sprung to fruition.
Where they took mental, if not physical, form.
He’d designed most of Earth in this series of rooms, all mirrors of his favorite places: the Library in the spacious study, accessible through the entryway; a wood shop in the second room; a kiln in the third; and a forge in the fourth.
Originally, there had been plans for a bedroom, but they’d been scrapped.
Consequently, Luc slept in the study, on the burgundy chaise lounge nestled under his favorite collection of scrolls. When he’d been tasked with designing his house an aeon ago, his workspaces were home to him, and home they remained.
Not that they had done him much good.
An aeon and a half he’d spent on his Earth project, only to be shot down, presentation after presentation, by everyone on the Council.
Michael, Muriel, and Raziel, he could understand. Michael was set in his ways, and Muriel and Raziel followed him blindly, bound by their collective status as the oldest Council members.
But some of the others had the same problems Luc had!
The weavers and the glassworkers, for example—Michael was cutting their projects off left and right in pursuit of more resources for the warriors.
An ever-widening rift had developed between those who believed the angels had strayed from their original purpose and those who believed the angels needed to adapt to the reality of the Creator’s increasing absence.
Those on the adaptive side resented the artisan guilds that had most benefited from the emphasis on ornamentation, and those guilds in turn resented being stripped of resources they had taken for granted for aeons.
Normally, Luc didn’t concern himself with such tedious arguments, but in this case, he’d thought to use the rift to his advantage—surely, some of the guilds would want a display of grandeur unbound by silly practicalities, if only to spite Michael!
It should have taken nothing to pit the squabbling factions against one another, then lure enough votes to his side, one by one.
And yet…not one angel had ever thought Luc’s project worth presenting to the Creator. Not one could be swayed.
Michael was scared of asking the Creator for too many resources, despite His limitless supply, and everyone else followed him like they hadn’t been created with their own eyes and ears.
This was only the latest blow in a long, fatiguing battle.
Kicking over an easel, Luc marched to one of three wooden tables that stretched to three-fourths of his study’s width and swept all his scrolls and loose pages to the floor.
A stained-glass prototype of Earth sat in the corner of the same table, and he snatched it up and smashed it against the table’s edge.
Blue and green glass shards spilled onto the pages below, and Luc crumpled to the white marble floor.
Grabbing page after page, he ripped his designs down the middle. Childish creations, all of them. And he should know because they’d been flooding his imagination since he was a child.
He’d sketched his creatures over and over, trying to get their features and dimensions just right.
And for what? So he could be ridiculed by the other Council members who thought they were so much better than him?
He, who had once been a prodigy! Someone his instructors had set their highest hopes on!
Luc’s reflection mocked him; his disorderly blond hair and sharp, pale features were distorted in the beveled glass encasing his floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves.
Why, after all this time, did he still feel like a student trying to win the masters’ approval when he himself was a master of the highest degree?!
He tore one stack of pages into smaller and smaller pieces, until the designs were unrecognizable. Until only shredded bits of color remained. He let the scraps collect on his lap and blindly rummaged for a new page to destroy.
This time, the page he picked up was an old one—one of the few pages of Lila’s original designs he still possessed: a lovely purple flower to fill Earth’s gardens.
A lilac.
Lila. He brushed his thumb over her signature at the bottom of the page.
In his mind’s eye, he saw Lila’s tall, lithe body bent over one of her sketches, her dark braid cascading down her back.
He knew that if he tried to peek at what she was doing too soon in her process, she would hunch her shoulders, cup her hand around her parchment, and peer up at him, scowling.
But, try as he might, he couldn’t make her turn around in the memory, not even to scowl at him.
He couldn’t see her face at all, only her back.
The high, embroidered collar of her white robes was pulled stiffly around her neck, shielding it from view.
Only her braid remained, an uncountable number of tiny braids woven into a larger one as tight and sleek as her fitted robes.
He often remembered her that way now, turned away from him, as if he’d only ever been eavesdropping on her work and not collaborating with her.
He’d give anything to eavesdrop once more.
Lila would have known how to make the Council see reason. She would have known the use of such a place.
But that was neither here nor there, and Luc cast the ancient page away.