Chapter Twenty-Three - Evie #2
Heaven opened before me as you would imagine, but it somehow still managed to surpass with grand buildings and gleaming colonnades built atop enormous banks of cloud, the kind of soft, luminous vastness mortals had painted for centuries when they tried to picture the afterlife.
Some cloud banks stretched wide as cities, their surfaces packed firm beneath terraces, gardens, and shining halls.
Others drifted lower, smaller, and more delicate, carrying pavilions, chapels, and quiet little courts suspended over open air.
Everything floated in mid-air. Everything gleamed. But it wasn’t gaudy. It was older, as if the whole place had been built to convince anyone who entered it that beauty and goodness were the same thing, intertwined.
There were magnificent iridescent bridges stretching between clouds, but there were those who could fly from place to place with their wings flashing white and gold in the light, crossing the distance between clouds easily.
But those who couldn’t rode gilded skiffs from cloud bank to cloud bank, their polished golden hulls skimming over bridges of mist and light.
Farther out, I saw whole districts of Heaven suspended across the sky, connected by arcing spans of alabaster and drifting causeways made of condensed cloud, as if someone had taken every mortal dream of paradise and forced it into perfect obedience.
I looked for whatever passed as Heaven’s entrance, a gate or something. I’d pictured some ornate golden monstrosity, something dramatic and obnoxiously holy. But as I turned slowly in place, I saw nothing that looked like an entrance at all.
Then it hit me that standing there gawking at the scenery like a tourist was probably a great way to get noticed.
So I squared my shoulders, lifted my chin, and started walking in the direction that looked the most purposeful, like I absolutely knew where I was going and had every right to be going there.
It was astonishing how often confidence worked as camouflage. And that lasted for about twelve seconds.
“Ediphiel?”
Fuck. The voice came from my left, warm and feminine and much too close. I stopped so fast that the hem of my dress whispered around my ankles.
A woman was standing at the mouth of a cloud-white path that curved between flowering trees and a low colonnade.
She was beautiful in the aggressively symmetrical way everyone here seemed to be beautiful, skin lit from within, pale gold robes, delicate gold at her wrists and throat.
She didn’t have wings, and she didn’t look like the others I’d seen in The Beloved.
Another Heavenly Artisan, maybe. High enough here to look at me directly. Low enough to be surprised.
Her expression was already shifting from recognition to confusion. I made myself smile, but not so much that it invited questions. Just enough to suggest I had somewhere holy and important to be.
“Yes?”
Her brows pulled together. “It has been an age! I did not know you had returned to the outer courts.”
Returned?
Cool. Great. This was going so well. I let my smile thin into something serene and mysterious, which I hoped read as celestial and not constipated.
“There is much in motion,” I said.
Yes, that sounded vague enough to be useful. Unfortunately, it also sounded like the kind of thing that invited more fucking attention because her confusion didn’t ease. If anything, it sharpened.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “There is.”
Silence stretched, and I could practically hear the trap assembling itself.
Then she inclined her head slightly and said, “May His Light order your steps.”
Ah. There it was. Some weird little script everyone else in this place seemed to know by heart, and I, apparently, didn’t.
I gave her what I hoped was a gracious nod. “And yours.”
Her face changed just a tiny bit. A pause and then a flicker in her eyes. The sort of reaction people had when you almost got it right.
Shit. I kept my expression smooth, but inside, I was already screaming.
She didn’t move from the path. “The First Light keep you,” she said, watching me more carefully now.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Could a cloud just swallow me now?
I smiled again, this time with more warmth, as if I were distracted by some private, radiant thought and not one wrong answer away from getting tackled into a decorative cloud hedge.
“Of course,” I said.
Another pause, longer this time. Her eyes traveled over me, the dress, the hair, the face, searching for whatever had snagged her instincts.
I remembered Cindralis’s warning about my eyes and took a careful step back.
I was near enough to convincing to make her hesitate, but not near enough to satisfy her.
“You seem…” she began, then stopped.
I took another step backward and gave her the softest laugh I could manage. “Pressed for time?”
That almost worked. But her suspicion lingered as delicate as frost.
“No,” she said. “You seem… altered.”
Well. That was incredibly inconvenient and unfortunately true.
I stepped back again and tilted my head. “I imagine one could say the same of us all.”
That earned me the faintest crease between her brows, like she couldn’t decide whether I sounded profound or insane.
I decided to stop giving her time to sort it out. “I have been called elsewhere,” I said smoothly, stepping as though the conversation had already ended. “If you’ll excuse me.”
She didn’t move, and my heart kicked hard against my ribs.
Then she said, very gently, “Praise be to The First Light.”
There it was again, not a statement this time. It was a prompt. A test.
I looked at her. She was no longer pretending this was casual. And I had exactly one second to decide whether to fake it and risk getting the wording wrong, or commit fully to a version of Ediphiel who was too important, too strange, or too touched by God to be questioned like this.
So naturally, I chose arrogance. I let my expression go still before I made a face like I was mildly surprised that she was still speaking.
Then I said, quiet and calm, “Does He require praise from me to recognize His own work?”
It came out before I could stop it. The woman blinked, and so did I, internally. This was either the smartest thing I’d ever said or the dumbest.
Her lips parted slightly. Her eyes searched my face with sudden uncertainty, and for one bright, terrible moment, I wondered if I’d just accidentally said something Ediphiel would have said, and my pulse fluttered haphazardly at the thought.
The woman lowered her gaze at once. It wasn’t completely submissive, but it was enough. “My apologies,” she said.
I had no idea whether she was apologizing because I’d bluffed successfully or because I’d just invoked some dynamic I didn’t understand. Either way, I was not stupid enough to question it. So I gave her a gracious nod, as if I forgave her for being deeply annoying, and kept walking.
My legs remained steady by force of will alone.
I didn’t look back, but I also didn’t run.
I floated, apparently. Or approximated floating through sheer panic and posture when my feet touched the ground.
Only when I had passed beneath the colonnade and turned into a wider cloudway crowded with other beings did I finally let myself breathe.
Holy shit.
Every person I passed looked polished and luminous and terrifyingly sure they belonged here.
Some had wings folded neatly against their backs.
Others had hooves. Those who looked like the Guardians, with two faces and in pale robes, moved in little groups, speaking softly to one another.
Lustrines, like Mara, with that strange wet-light shimmer to their skin, carried trays, scrolls, bowls of fruit, armfuls of flowers.
No one hurried. No one looked around as if they did not know where they were going.
I kept moving as my heart slammed against my chest because now there was a new problem. I still had no idea where I was going and Luc was no where to be found. Someone else was going to stop me, and I was either going to say something that got me caught or, worse, got me killed.
Stopping felt dangerous, and looking lost felt even worse.
So I kept my face serene and my pace even as my heart knocked against my ribs, and I told myself that somewhere in this blinding, cloud-built nightmare, Lucifer was looking for me.
Somewhere. I just had to survive Heaven long enough to be found.
What I needed was distance. Distance from the Beloved and from Him. And I needed to look like I wasn’t trying to escape.
Ahead, the cloud bank widened into a little landing of white stone and gold railings, where a skiff bobbed gently against the edge of the mist like it was tied to something under the clouds.
Its hull shone pale and polished, half swan, half ceremonial ferry, and a pair of Lustrine attendants stood nearby with their heads bowed, waiting for passengers who looked like they belonged here more than I did.
Perfect.
If I could get onto the skiff, I could cross to the next cloud bank. And from there, maybe farther still. Then, beyond the cloud bank I was heading for, farther out and slightly lower, something shifted.
At first I thought it was just more movement, another flurry of white wings or attendants changing course. But no. There was a shape to it. A disruption. A cluster of bodies drawing inward too quickly. A tightening in the otherwise perfect floating order of the place.
I slowed without meaning to, trying to get a better look.
But it was far enough away that I couldn’t make out much, just flashes, some motion, the occasional lift of wings, maybe someone being jostled backward.
It was happening on the next cloud bank past the one I was trying to reach, half-hidden by flowering trees and a colonnade that kept slicing the view into pieces.
My stomach dropped. Was it Luc? The thought came hard and immediate and awful.