Chapter 30
Present Aeon
“Come on, Lila.”
Now that they were back on the main pathway stretching from the Gates in the South to the Great Hall in the North, Eva was dragging Lila toward Luc’s house, buoyed by her recent confession. If only she cared about Lila’s willingness to participate.
“Have you lost your head?” Lila hissed, trying to slip from Eva’s grasp without causing a scene. The ideas her friend got sometimes.
“You have to tell him,” Eva insisted.
“Tell him what?” Lila dug her heels in, halting their progress along the marble path that wound through the middle of the Dwellings.
The angels’ homes were buildings of stone, painted white, in varying shapes and sizes.
Some with columns and porticoes, some without.
Some arched and rounded, some sharp and rectangular.
Lila’s own house curved at its edges, but Luc’s house was of the rectangular variety, with striking blue doors and window trim set against the soft white stone.
Despite being one of the largest houses in its vicinity, it was only one story tall and not nearly as large as some of the other Council members’ homes.
She always passed it on her way to sword-fighting lessons, though it sat, mercifully, in the opposite direction from her and Castor’s workshop.
She had no desire to pass by it every time she went to work, and again when she came back.
She also had no desire to view it from the inside and acquaint herself with the future she’d rejected. Though Eva seemed bent on making her do just that.
“Why do you care if I talk to him again or not?” She gestured helplessly.
“Because my happy ending is finished, but you can still have one.” Eva’s face had flushed from exertion, and her strawberry blonde hair had given up on trying to be in a bun. It flung itself haphazardly around her face and over her shoulders.
“What happy ending, Eva?! Luc is locked inside his house! And I’m…” Lila dropped her voice as another angel neared. “I’m under the same restrictions I’ve always had. I can’t visit him out in the open like this.”
“Lila.” Eva squeezed her wrist. She waited until the angel had passed them and walked on a fair distance. “He kept your garden in his designs this whole time. It’s practically a centerpiece! Are you honestly going to say nothing when it was your project too?”
Lila swallowed. Due to the feasting, almost no one was around, but she’d never felt so exposed.
Eva didn’t understand. Seeing Earth had been painful, but seeing Luc would slice her with a thousand swords at once.
Only love hurts like that.
Eva’s words taunted her.
She didn’t want love. She’d been fine with her existence. She’d been fine.
Why did Luc have to barge back into her midst now?
“Lila.” Her friend’s voice softened. “I think you’ll regret it if you don’t say anything.
” She pressed a supportive hand to Lila’s arm, and Lila wanted to shake her off.
She wanted to shake off the memory of Earth—its conception, its evolution, its creation, its architect, and the humans who were sure to ruin it.
She wanted to fling herself out of every memory she had of Luc, to fling herself out of her own skin. But she couldn’t move.
Finally, she said, “Okay. But let me go alone.”
Luc’s idea for the sword had worked. Once the os lucis and steel alloy had liquefied, the dark matter had dissolved into it under pressure.
As he’d hoped, the entropy in the system had decreased once the gas had dissolved into the liquid.
After adding more steel, he’d carefully reheated and cooled the alloy multiple times, descaled it, heated it a final time, then poured it into its mold.
Now came the most exciting part. It was time to shape the sword into its final form.
Taking the billet of heated metal from the forge, Luc set it on the anvil and began hammering out the tip of the blade.
It was soothing, the familiar sight of flakes falling off the glowing metal, the rhythmic clang of the hammer.
In his role on the Council, Luc had mainly passed instructions to the lower artisans, and he’d often missed the satisfaction that came from shaping material with his own hands, from straining physically toward his end goal.
As he reheated the blade and smoothed it out, Luc felt peaceful in the solitude of his project. In the knowledge that he was creating something wholly unique, in a category of its own. A wild thing, untamed by the Council’s opinions and the Creator’s limited view.
The thought had occurred to Luc that Earth had never been his idea, that perhaps the Creator had been pulling the strings of his imagination the entire time.
Well, Luc was finished with being controlled.
He would never again be under the thumb of the Creator or Michael or Hadri or anyone else.
And one thing he knew—the Creator would never dare to devise such a device as the sword Luc was currently fashioning.
The Void was His antithesis. He wouldn’t dare to touch it, much less attempt to harness its power.
But with it, Luc planned on going to Earth. Regardless of Hadri’s intentions, he would be a fool not to investigate the trees that supposedly contained the Creator’s knowledge. For he’d been turning it over in his mind, and he believed he’d figured out why Hadri had told him about them.
He was destined to destroy Heaven, and who could destroy Heaven but the Creator? Or someone with powers equal to the Creator?
Hadri had told him so that his prophecy could be set in motion, though he had no idea why Hadri would want Heaven destroyed. But what did he know of Hadri? Or of anyone?
All Luc knew was that he could use the Creator’s powers for his own ends, instead of being trapped in a prophecy he didn’t deserve. He’d only ever worked for the betterment of Heaven, and this was the gratitude he received?
Well, if Heaven didn’t want him, then he was done with the place. He would build his own world, surpassing Heaven, surpassing Earth.
But first, he needed a way out.
The knock at Luc’s front door was so timid that he almost missed it between the noise of his hammer and his distracted thoughts. But when he’d set the sword to cool, the knock rang out, unmistakable.
Was it Braun? But he heard no boisterous ‘Master Lucifer!’ Surely, the other warriors hadn’t arrived with orders to destroy the last of his house. They would have burst in, breaking the door down.
All the same, Luc crept to the door with caution. He cracked it open.
To his shock, the knock belonged to Lila. He swung the door wide, and she stood there, shuffling her feet and asking if he minded a visit from an old friend.
An old friend? Lila?
Lila, for whom secrecy was the footnote to every facet of their relationship.
But there she stood in front of his house. In the middle of the main thoroughfare for all to see.
Granted, most everyone had gone to the feast, but still, this wasn’t like Lila. It was reckless. He wondered what she wanted.
When Luc didn’t answer, Lila slipped through the door he held open. He shut it, and she entered his study, tall and graceful in her flowing robes. A glint of her old curiosity surfaced as she surveyed the room.
Sometimes she appeared there in Luc’s dreams. In the half-lucid moments before he woke. She knelt beside the chaise and told him, with a wry smile, to get back to work. She’d never appeared while he was awake, though, so her sudden presence confounded him nearly as much as his vision had.
She wasn’t there to…spy on him, was she?
Luc dismissed the thought as quickly as it came. Lila hated the Council. Even if he didn’t know how she felt about him, that much had always been true.
Besides, he could push everyone away, but not her.
Not her.
“What do you want, Lila?” he asked.
“What do I want?” Crossing her arms, she turned to him. “Shouldn’t you offer me tea? Or, I don’t know, a chair?”
Luc gestured to the chaise lounge, and she sat.
“I don’t have tea.” Luc braced his back on a worktable. “So what is it? You must have a reason for visiting. It is your first visit, after all.”
Lila touched her wrist in a self-soothing manner, the way she did when flustered. Her mannerisms were the same, after so long.
“Well…” she began haltingly, “I went down to Earth, and I wanted to say you outdid yourself. It’s lovely.” A tiny smile surfaced. “And I’m sorry that you’re stuck here. I suppose that’s my fault. I gave you the idea to go behind the Council’s back.” She glanced down at her lap.
“I don’t blame you.” Luc frowned. “You were right, back then. I shouldn’t have asked the Council about us. I shouldn’t have trusted them.”
Lila met his eyes in surprise.
“What? You don’t think I can admit when I’ve been wrong?”
“I didn’t think you were self-aware enough to know when you’ve been wrong.”
Luc laughed. He’d missed Lila’s bluntness. He hadn’t known how much he’d missed it until he’d seen her at their old meeting spot.
As a student, he’d counted on Lila to always tell him the truth, and he liked to think he could still trust her, even if he couldn’t trust anyone else.
She was the only angel who’d ever responded to him with complete honesty.
With no agenda. Other than the one she’d spelled out for him once when he’d been a young angel who’d wanted nothing more than to kiss her as often as he liked.
And she was there, after so much time. She’d come back.
He still thought there was a reason he’d been drawn to her; she even had her own vision, apart from Castor’s, though he didn’t want to reveal it to her. Not yet, knowing she would expect him to know about his own.
At any rate, he needed to get back to his sword, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to test her.
“Do you remember when you accused me of being obsessed with the Void?”
Lila snorted.
“That wasn’t an accusation. It was a fact.”
“Right. Well, my obsession might have paid off. Would you like to see?”