Chapter 3 Present Aeon
Present Aeon
The young warrior challenging Lila was apprehensive. She could see it in his face as they bowed to each other and took their opening stances, swords extended toward one another at waist level.
So he’d noticed this much from watching her spar with others: Lila was tireless.
Lila was brutal. Most warriors-in-training put a stop to their match once they’d been wounded, but not Lila.
Most warriors had a healthy fear of weaponry, but Lila feared nothing.
She’d stood at the edge of the Void too many times, pondering how easily she could disappear beneath its immaterial sheet, to fear being swallowed up by it. Or run through with a practice sword.
If she didn’t beat her opponents with skill, she’d beat them with ferocity.
Master Dimas, the instructor, looked down on her for coming from carpentry, but she was used to that, and it wasn’t relevant, so long as he humored her by allowing her to take lessons.
The only thing that mattered was that when the student warrior raised his sword overhead to an attack position, his eyes betrayed his fear.
Lila breathed in. Centered herself. Let the sword become an extension of her body.
When he swung his sword down, she met his strike easily. She let her blade linger, teasingly, against the tip of his sword before drawing back and slashing at him from the side. He sidestepped and fell back.
They circled each other, then struck again. One lunged, and the other followed. The clang of blade meeting blade rang out again and again like a chaotic bell.
A few back-to-back overhead blows sent tremors through Lila’s arms, but she surged forward, adrenaline pumping, grinding her sword against the young warrior’s until their hilts nearly touched.
There, they paused, pushing against one another and panting in each other’s faces.
He shoved, and she stumbled back. She shoved, and he fell back even further.
Releasing him, she struck while he remained off-balance, but he met the blow that fell right in front of his face.
She struck again, and he deflected. Again, and he lurched aside, but not before she nicked his arm.
“Come on, Braun,” Master Dimas admonished. “Going to let the carpenter wear you out? Is your body made of wood? Get moving!”
Snickers broke out in the crowd of young warriors gathered to watch the spectacle. Some teased Braun. Some egged him on. A few of the annoying ones chanted Lila’s name in jest.
“Yes, sir!” Braun shouted. Circling Lila once more, he set his jaw and lifted his sword overhead, the tip of it pointed behind him.
His shoulders were tense. He was trying too hard.
Lila breathed. The crowd of warriors fell away. Master Dimas fell away too; he sunk into the Void of Lila’s mind.
She swung at Braun, her body a hammer, chipping away at his strength.
Her sword a chisel, scraping at his sword.
She struck at the blade like she might slice right through it.
Or break it or bend it out of shape. Or strip it clean of its shining finish.
One cut, then another, then another, in rapid succession.
She didn’t pause for breath until her exhaustion hit her all at once.
Braun was still standing, though he looked as battered as she felt.
She was tired now; he might stand a chance against her if he could summon the energy.
But, too soon, Master Dimas declared the match finished.
Lila had drawn first blood, which meant she had won.
Lessons were over, and he had places to be.
Braun dropped his sword, coughing, and bent over with his hands on his knees.
Lowering her own sword, Lila met Master Dimas’s dissatisfied stare with equal rebuke until he turned his back.
At the entrance to the armory, Lila and Braun handed their practice swords over to the warriors-in-training that had been charged with the storage of weapons.
“Sorry about that.” She winced, gesturing to his injured arm. “I know I can be too intense sometimes.”
“No, no, you’re amazing! You’re the best in our class!” Braun assured her, bobbing his head enthusiastically. His long black hair stuck out at odd angles from the sloppy knot atop his head.
The student warrior, an aeon younger than her, had the infectious buoyancy of youth, and Lila returned his smile. Admiration was not a reaction she often received.
“Well…let me wrap that injury for you.” Lila gestured to the bloodied sleeve of his robes. She grabbed a few strips of cloth and a pot of healing salve from a wooden table that had been laden with supplies for that purpose.
Nowhere else in Heaven could angels break and bleed, but here they could.
It was a necessary pain to sustain their existence.
A healthy fear of being wounded meant a healthy fear of the Void, and os lucis, the substance of the swords and of the angels’ very bones, was the only substance in Heaven capable of harming an angel.
They learned all this in lessons: the Creator had always been there.
He always was. But Heaven had not been, and neither had the angels.
In the beginning—not the Creator’s beginning, but the angels’ beginning—the Creator, weary of solitude, had carved through the nothingness a path of light that would become the boundaries of Heaven.
But just as the state of the Creator never changed, neither did the state of the Void beyond His realm.
The Creator could create. He was all-powerful, save for this one weakness.
Existence could not exist without extinction, or order without chaos, or light without dark.
All of the Creator’s works could be slowly devoured, one by one, until He was alone in the endless Void once more, if the angels did not help to prevent it.
Only the warriors’ swords kept the encroaching darkness of the Void—the threat of an endless nothingness—at bay.
“Actually, I’ve wanted to go up against you for a while,” Braun noted as Lila sat with him on a nearby wooden bench, “but I knew I would get beaten pretty badly, so…thanks for taking it easy on me.”
“Easy?” Lila chuckled. “You could have beaten me with a single, well-timed stroke. Your posture just needs a little improvement.”
“Oh, yeah.” Braun scratched his chin; he watched Lila bare his injured arm and soak up the excess blood. “Master Dimas always says that,” he mentioned, then added, “I didn’t want to be a warrior, you know.”
“No?” Lila frowned, applying the clear salve. It glowed where it touched the wound, signaling that the healing process had begun, that Braun’s skin was knitting itself back together. “Why are you here then?” she asked.
“Well, when I was younger, the instructors made it seem like this was the most important guild to join. Like the Council needed the most angels here. I didn’t know what else I wanted to do, so when they asked me, I picked this guild.”
“I see.” Lila wrapped his arm, then secured the dressing with a pin. “When I was in lessons, everyone wanted to be an architect. So much so that the requirements to get into the program were raised every lessons period. I guess times have changed.”
“Were you in lessons with Master Lucifer?”
“Master Lu…Why do you ask that?” Lila tensed.
Braun shrugged.
“I just thought you graduated at the same time as him.”
“Oh.” Her heart fell back into her chest. “Well, yes, I did have classes with him when I was younger. Much younger. Even younger than you are now.”
“What was that like? Did he know all the answers? Did the instructors get annoyed because he was smarter than them?”
Lila laughed.
“Yes, but how do you know that?”
“I’m his neighbor.”
“His…? Don’t the students live together?” Lila squinted at Braun, taking in his innocent eyes and messy appearance. Was he old enough to have his own house? She couldn’t believe it.
Braun shook his head.
“Not anymore. Since there are so few of us now, and all of us are old enough to live by ourselves, we got to choose our houses early. They’re turning the old dormitories into a larger arsenal…Oh, but no one’s supposed to know that yet, so you didn’t hear it from me.”
“Why do we need a larger arsenal? Is Heaven expanding? Are there problems with the Void?”
Braun shrugged.
“Maybe Master Dimas knows, but he doesn’t tell us why, just what to do.”
“Are you Master Lila?” A stout, brown-haired messenger angel appeared out of nowhere next to the bench, startling Lila.
His way of addressing her was odd. She was a master of her craft, of course, but only the few remaining student angels addressed her that way. Everyone else simply called her ‘Lila.’
“I am,” she answered.
“I have a message from the council.” Extending a stiff arm, the messenger offered her a sealed scroll. A scholar pin gleamed on the collar of his white robes: a replica of the columned front face of the Library.
If talking to Braun had lifted her spirits, this message instantly deflated it. Sweet aether, what furniture order had Castor messed up this time?
“What does the woodworking council want?”
“Not woodworking. The Council.”
Lila frowned.
“Oh.” She accepted the scroll from the messenger. “Thank you.”
The angel nodded and swiftly vanished, swooping up into the aether and out of sight.
“Hmm, that looks important,” Braun noted, and Lila glanced at him. She’d almost forgotten he was there.
“Uh, yes.” Lila fiddled with the scroll, hesitant to open it in front of Braun. Only one person on the Council would ever contact her, and she’d rather not read whatever he had to say with someone who clearly admired him peering over her shoulder.
“Well…” Braun got up, apparently sensing the change in atmosphere. “I’ll see you at our next lesson, Master Lila.”
“Of course, I’ll see you then.”
“Maybe I’ll bandage you up instead,” he added with a cheeky grin.
“Maybe you will.” Lila smiled and waved him off. She waited until he’d walked a good distance away and checked to make sure no one else was around before breaking the gold wax seal and unrolling the message.
When she saw what the scroll contained—a flower blueprint she’d drawn over an aeon ago—she knew that her guess had been correct.