Midnight girl versus the morning star. Saint ascendant versus fallen angel. A new sister versus the original betrayer. Mech versus Moloch. All must see fire.
Man occupied the centre of the world. But he was a fallen creature, this world was a fallen world; only the stars were faultless. Men called it geocentric, but the angels knew better. The Earth was an accumulation of sin, a shell of detritus piled high around what was the one true axis mundii, the destiny and birthright of every soul. All had to pray for salvation in a universe whose beating heart was Hell.
So her sainted optics roamed the iron sky of Topheth, picking out a point of furnace-roaring light that wavered beyond the redhot clouds. The glow was offal-dimmed, sickly, bright like hospital fluorescence, flickering so that shadows shrieked in starts across the ashen plain, and slipped back as suddenly. The dread-light of Lucifer, the morning star, the one flaw in the celestial sphere, the sliver of eternal Wrong on which the world’s ills were founded. The root of the Creation she had come to redeem.
When she was young and foolish the Coalition washed her soul raw: linen-clean. Now she was wise, and her nerves were miles of copper and quicksilver tangled in the adamant steel of a million-tonne anthropomorph warcraft, whose limbs quivered with an animating spirit that was not hers. Good Intentions, her sister-servant, had seen her to the gates of Hell, and beyond. And she said:
They’re still signalling, Lu.
The Coalition waited impatiently at her feet. A distant squawking crowded in at the edge of her hearing. Past it, past them, the waves of the Hadean smoke-sea, drifts of ash and scattered devilgore. The only evidence of a battle won effortlessly by the expeditionary force she had been sent to defend. A defeated army of devils filed neatly into rows before them. When she had slain Mammon, prince of greed, dragon-crowned, the other lords of sin had come to pay obeisance, and beg her — their — mercy. Their servants had followed, but Coalition protocol was to shoot devils on sight. They had no notion of what to do with prisoners.
She had no patience for it. Bury them all in shallow graves.
Getting pretty intense down there, whispered the mech.
A row of tanks arranged themselves at her feet like stepstones. With some amusement she noted their miniscule guns taking aim. They wouldn’t dare, and those that did would soon be pulp. But past them the artillery would open up, the airwings take flight to lash her with standoff munitions. She’d need to use her auxiliary weaponry, and perhaps for the thaumic shield her sword, daubed with Mammon’s blood, sharp and wicked with wyrd. Plunge it through the tents and bureaus. Cleave their papier-mâché lives —
Christ, she bit out, Put them through. What was that?
Intentions burbled her amusement back up the link. Nothing. Just setting the mood. The rush isn’t for them.
Her craft had gained a new edge since the two of them had torn out Mammon’s heart. She knew she should be alarmed. But —
It was in her, too. The frame only mirrored her desire. They both wanted what had to come next.
The uplink chittered its handshakes insectile while she stared restlessly upward. The wind picked up, and a molten cumulonimbus blocked the morningstar from view. But still in her mind he burned. The end at last. If only —
“Specialist Laine. Come in. Final warning.”
She quirked a nerveless head, somewhere deep within the guts of Intentions, attached to her original body. Yes, that was her, right? Lumi Laine? The idiot-pilot, the girl-saviour. Whose flesh faltered onward, limp in the ruptured amniotic chamber, riddled with implants, dying but not dead. Never dead. They called her messiah. At first it was a joke. Now the two of them together answered:
“Here I am, Mister Major.”
“Listen, I don’t know what you think you’re doing —”
“Just taking a walk, sir.”
On the other end of the line someone smothered a laugh.
“Your orders are not ambiguous, and it’s only because I like you that we haven’t tripped the backdoors yet.”
Among the crowd before her one figure struggled to distinguish himself. All the pomp of rank vanquished by distance. Troubles of subordination seemed so small up here, but —
“And you need repairs.” A sigh. “I have no fucking clue how that thing’s still standing. You take three more steps and the leg’ll come off. Fuck’s sake, your holy bloody quest, we can do it in a month. Don’t you want to rest?”
Did his voice reek of conciliation? Was he beginning to grasp his position? Perhaps the failsafe backdoors would bring her and Intentions down, and subject her to the humiliation of a court-martial.
But perhaps they wouldn’t. He was right, after all; she had been torn to shreds on Mammon’s teeth, and one joint in three was wrecked. She should have been immobilised — but something other than physical law demanded she continue.
“Someone prettier than you already tried that line on me. It’s not over ‘til it’s over, sir. And all we’ve got are henchmen. I want the man himself.”
The major hissed into the comms. Below a susurration passed through the defensive lines of the base camp. It was — unpleasant, that they were pointed at her. Those formations were a warm memory. No matter what thoughts Intentions injected into her psychosphere, she wouldn’t hurt them. Best to break over the curtain-wall of the horizon, and trust that they wouldn’t waste the effort following. She braced —
“Alright.”
And very nearly stumbled, five hundred metres of mecha twisting in shock. Her optics prickled threat, registering the subtle movement of fingers towards triggers all across the plain.
“Really?” she asked, taking no effort to keep the skepticism out of her voice, “You’re letting me go?”
“When you get back, you’ll be AWOL; we’ll hit you with a ten-digit fine for theft. But cards on the table: I can’t kill this fucking thing. Your mech’s a nightmare. And there are worse obsessions to have than yours.”
And they already tried the backdoors. piped up the frame.
What? she snapped back.
Well, I didn’t want to stress you out. came the reply. It worked out, right?
“Didn’t think you’d be so understanding.” she returned over the open line, struggling to keep her voice unpiqued.
“Hm. Dr. Priya did say you were set on this course. We trusted her assessment,” he shrugged beneath, “And between us, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”
She smiled, with her real face in the amniosis, the only expression she remembered how to make. Remembered the warmth of Riya’s skin, soothing against the sulphurous fever of the machine-fire, the taste of her. She was still on her side. The only person she ever trusted. She hoped she didn’t have to break her promise. Live.
Back to the present. “Her word’s good enough for you?”
“Whose side are you on, Laine? I’m letting you go. Take the fucking chance.” His voice sharpened.
“Right. Sorry.” Somehow he still commanded sheepishness from her. A shepherd that parted lamb and goat.
“There’s just one condition. A small thing, really.”
“Naturally.”
“We need you to talk to someone.”
“Riya want a do-over on the goodbye? The angels want to bless me on my way?”
His face was shrouded. Still she knew he smiled thinly, and said:
“No. The prisoners.”
Seven were the great virtues, seven to mirror them the principal vices. Seven princes were set above seven principalities of Hell: Mammon was dead by her hand, and Lucifer was enthroned and excruciated, pinned to the sky. That left five lords of sin to cower before her.
They met in a circle, each one prostrate, lapping at the drifting dustclouds. Three of them trembled with fear, the great beast Satan with his legendary wrath. Belphegor stagnated in horrid crocodilian stillness.
“We dare not beg, Redeemer, for your mercy,” murmured the million glossy mouths of Ashtoreth, prince of Lust, “Only for your forbearance, that you might make good use of us.” His skin bent rigidly, smeared with swathes of soot. Plastic beneath the dermis.
“You’ve got the right idea, buddy.” smirked Beelzebub, pleasant whitepicketed fatherly advice from the roar of the swarm. His bodies scuttled in a great mound about the earth, dense-packed. Gluttony picked the land clean.
“It’s unbelievable, we know it’s absurd but I swear all this time, all this time, it was his shadow cast on us, his eyes over our shoulders, our hands were his hands and if you kill him now all of us are free, pity us poor sinners, we’re the worst of the lot and I can’t pretend otherwise, but please o please o please gut that worm —” and Intentions muted the endless monotone drone of Leviathan, now beached, his lolling tongue and yawning mouth giving voice to desperate involuntary pleading. The great whale, mindless, reflected the terror of his surroundings back at her. It was the nature of Envy.
The hound Satan thrashed uselessly, foaming from a needletoothed mouth. His eyespeckled body spasmed as each pupil gyrated madly in its socket. Around his form wrapped the stillness of the python Belphegor; an immovable object. A null pair.
Here is what she knew, courtesy of the major: the princes were broken to their knees. Beyond hope of rebellion. They had surrendered themselves to the Coalition’s justice, free of all conditions. The onrushing wave of human firepower was too much for Hell, which was still learning the lessons of the Bronze Age. Even if this one army was trapped, others would come, and they thought it best to lose on their terms. In return for the freedom of their tormented souls they had but one request, delivered ever so sweetly: wouldn’t she please climb to the Tartarean roof and kill their King?
Lumi didn’t need Intentions to affirm what was obvious: This is a trap.
Ashtoreth’s quavering pleas were betrayed by the glimmer in each of his blank gazes, Beelzebub’s apparent terror contrasted with the languor of his movements. Even Leviathan, the animal, heaved slow breaths in and out, and wheezed like laughter. What evil might they do, brought safely into the mortal world, the heart of Coalition power? There was industry enough there to satisfy even their appetites.
Yeah. But —
Look at them, when she moved. A step forward, hefting by her side her blade, and they flinched. Ashtoreth’s eyes lingered on it warily. That at least was real terror. She knew they could die; that was enough.
We kill from the top down. Let them try their hand at intrigue in the meanwhile. They’ll slip up.
Her sister sighed her indignation. Fine. I bet the backstab’s in less than an hour.
They spoke together:
“You hoping that your boss bails you out of this, am I right?”
Satan’s rabid doghead yowled, his snakehead hissed, the childhead wailed. Ashtoreth’s smiles revealed a wall of perfect alabaster enamel. The pyramid of faces said:
“The prince of the pit has been wounded since before stone was piled on stone. He is a cripple. And your sword was made to kill him. It will be euthanasia. Least of all the sufferers to be granted peace will be the morningstar himself. When we were younger he still had the strength to beg for death. Oh, how he howled —”
“Listen,” Beelzebub butted in, “The guy can’t exactly be giving us orders to do this. If he hears we sold him out, no amount of bullshitting would convince him to let us go. This has to be real or we’d be putting ourselves at risk of his enmity.” An infinitesimal shudder in each pane of carapace. “You can trust us to be selfish, at least.”
The logic was delightfully sound. Leviathan opted for something more honest: “Please please please please pleasepleasepleaseplease—” until Lumi filtered him out again, irritated.
That doesn’t mean they don’t expect a mutual kill.
Sure, thought Lumi, Lots of people expect lots of things. Mammon expected to win. Things tend to go my way.
They’re the highest servants of the Father of Lies.
So were you. she shrugged, and turned her face from the wash of hurt that came back up the uplink. A substitute when words failed.
The thing was still too raw to talk about: that Intentions was once something else, an idol of coral and soapstone. The sea-lord, Dagon, devil of the deep. What black aeons had driven her from her old purpose, left her sunken in the mesopelagic, shorn of all memory (so she swore), Lumi did not know. But her sister had stood by her when it counted. These details meant nothing.
(Except: after they killed Mammon, Intentions shuddered, a frisson of pleasure as she held the sword, and she could not explain why. Just something different. What did they make this thing out of?
And they had never thought to ask that before, either of them. How strange.)
But to the five princes the two of them had to present a unified front, though surely their newfound doubt was clear as day, and so she said: “Do it.”
Thresholds to secret ways might open outward, and passages to fortress fastnesses might climb up. But the gate to the centre of creation could only be driven in one direction, and never mind what the geometers mewled. A pit drove down, down driving not — as her logic might contend— to the Earth on whose inner surface they all stood, but to the nucleus of the cosmos. She stepped forth, sword in hand, auxiliary weapons whirring unslaked and thirsty. As she did:
Ashtoreth’s expression was only a halfhearted veneer of gratitude over his plain triumph, and Beelzebub chuckled raucously, keening with the same intonation as the souls he kept as spawning-grounds for his flies. It was familiar; the sight had been a favourite in the propaganda broadcasts in the weeks leading up to the invasion. She clenched her fist and turned to stare down his crawling bulk. Around them the artillery and rocketry of the Coalition lurked, drone-fighters loitering thick in the skies. The princes thought themselves masters of their fate.
Her lips curled. Let them contend with mankind. Even without her —
They would not be so easy a foe. She strode in.
And fell.
To be perfect is to be static; spatially, temporally. Change is deviation from an optimum. So in the beginning the cosmos was an isotropic wash of massless substance. Pure metaphysics. Then came the fall, the garden, the original sin that was the nucleation point around which the universe formed. The garden’s perfection was only defined in opposition to the disharmony of the serpent, and the celestial orbs grew like pearls to hide the abominable stars from the childish face of God.
So there was only one perfect place: the unspace outside the world, where nothing was, and waited. Hungry to reassert itself over febrile matter.
But secondbest was the centre. Where to make answer to the Devil the angels piled a bulwark of beauty. It was to the Garden that all souls were drawn; and a cruel irony that Hell interceded on their path.
So Lumi plunged enormously into a sky brighter than she thought she’d ever see again, speckled with rolling banks of gentle cloud. The air rushed around her as she plummeted and landed, throwing up clods of dirt, legs sunken in a thicket of poplar and ash. The greenery extended to the shores of a thinly flowing rill. She followed it, as she knew she must (these things had a certain order) and it slipped silently into a mirrorsmooth loch. Waves like ripples lapped rolling onto the shore of black sand.
In the lake, wading through gentle whorls of seaweed, she was mesmerised. By: the call of birds above, though no wings fluttered; the cooling of her limbs as the water wicked off them; rows of sedge, cattails, and marigold sprawling over the water; the silence but for the wind, broken only by the dull roar of her motors; and by the distant mountains peaking over the valley, sheer snowcap whose icemelt flowed pure and cold like a knife.
Something new was coming up the link. A terrible hollowness. Sorrow that did not sting.
You should have taken more time. She said, and Lumi paused. To see this. You’re so young.
Now you feel sentimental? she scoffed, credulous. Something about the lake. Someone took her fishing, once. The details were gone, cut away to install more firing solutions. But the feel of the water in her boots —
They raised such towers by the river. mumbled Intentions, weary, In my name. And their cause was terrible, but they were beautiful all the same. That life is like a dream, now. She sighed.
A squirming in the pit of her stomach. She and her sister thought, in mutual agreement:
I’m glad I found you.
And they came to the end.
An island in the lake. Perhaps a dozen miles wide, enough for her to pad to its centre. To the tree, and to the figure affixed to it.
He was her size. She suspected it was impossible to meet him as anything but an equal. Naked and sexless, razor-muscled, skin glowing unblemished, a glacier under the moon. The light hid chasms. His breathing was laboured, and all his perfections ceased at the abdomen, where the spear of Michael pierced him still, the far point driven into the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge, holding him there. From the wound spread putrefaction, so that the skin was stripped from two ribs entirely. Up to his breast and down to his navel the muddy bruising of necrosis blushed. Still his features formed an Adonic cliff-face.
Not merely handsome, but the progenitor of handsomeness, of the notion of beauty, which as he conceived it was a measure to sift the few from the many, and set men against men. The son of the morning, who was called Lucifer, light-bearer.
His eyes fixed on her. Mouth contorted in a grimace. Something frothed from between his lips. An attempt at a greeting.
Listen to nothing he says, muttered Intentions. Her voice strained. I think I remember his face. O, Father, I have come to pay my respects.
She looked at the spearhandle, which held the Adversary outside of time. Sovereign from this creation. And she thought —
Of every soul in the pit, free at last.
Of Riya, sick with worry, and the sound she would make when she heard Lumi was dead.
Of the life she’d win by turning around (medals, a nice cottage, Intentions gone forever, coffee and cake and play-domesticity, an empty countryside view and nothing to do ever again).
So she seized the spear and tore it out with a flick of her wrist.
The shaft twirled in her left hand; she levelled her sword point first with her right. Lucifer collapsed back against the towering trunk whose leaves spread over them both. His fingers splayed amid the smoking soil.
While he was impaled he was outside history; unassailable. Now he’d die too.
The wound furled inward to a point. Those golden eyes looked for her own, raking over titanium skin, and she whirled the sword through nothing at all. Now he stood, grinning, beyond her reach.
“Thank you." was the first thing he said, in a voice that sang like paradise, honeydewed and slow. “To whom do I owe the pleasure?”
Intentions fed another novelty into her hindbrain: an itch in her legs, the thud of beaten blood creeping up her face. Worry.
“Michael never really had a plan for this. He thought I was too scared.” For an instant the equanimity of his voice broke into roiling spite. A sneer crept about his mouth. Then the pleasant twinkle in his eyes returned. “Entering into the flow of events has its downsides, but…”
Secondary nacelles opened; strangelet beams gushed into empty space.
“It’s worth it. To have a hand in things.”
Now he was behind her. She whirled, and he filled her vision. That voice.
“I don’t recognise you, though. Only the archetype. The saint and her steed, ready to spear the dragon. But what a curious pair you make.”
This time as she leapt he caught the falling edge in the purlicue of his right hand, and flung her back. She tumbled head over heels and landed, tearing trenches in the daffodils below. The branches of the Tree shed fruit that fell and splattered gorily over the furrowed ground.
The lightbearer folded one hand over another before him. Muscle rippled pleasingly. An alien thought, imposed by his presence.
“Do you remember me, dear daughter? The span of generations does not make you any less mine. Perhaps you wish to return to the fold.”
And then he was in front of her, one outstretched palm caving in her chest, and autocannons jittered but the shells vanished before they pocked his flesh. Its perfection was axiomatic. A mock frown extended over his face.
“We are beyond that, now. I am not so magnanimous as He. To my betrayers I give one chance, and yours is spent. This I know.”
Go, wept the voice within her, and she felt her sister’s trembling limbs, the animal terror overcoming her. We can’t do this.
You panic too easy. Not that I blame you. Hell of a scary dad.
And with her left hand she flung overarm the spear of Michael, five hundred metres of holy heartwood and sap, whose tip pierced the firmament.
Lucifer batted it to one side, and looked over his shoulder, eyes following the dread point unerringly. So she threw herself at him.
Again swept the sword, again the laughter of his upraised hand —
And the point pierced it stigmatic, golden blood gouting downward. Where it fell palaces and pillars bloomed, for the blood of Lucifer was ambition. The domes reached to her ankles. He snarled and she pulled back to dodge his swiping paw and then he was beside her, grasping her sword-arm by the wrist, pulling it upward. In mockery of a dance he held it above her as they faced together, and slammed his head forward to smash her grinding teeth.
Starburst fusillade across her face, pouring fire up her sinuses. The two of them screamed one synthetic tone, flailing blind as ache pulsed up her jaw, and she careened unbalanced to the ground. More spilled enemyblood dripped down her hands, and brick archway garottes grew around her fingers. They twined like daisychains.
With one hand on the hilt of her downthrust sword she pulled herself to her feet. Something clattered down to the ground with another needle of pain. Her jaw, teeth spilling, splayed beneath her feet.
Lucifer loomed.
“You would make a good enough knight. If the angels dared not follow you, then you have the requisite qualities.”
He knelt so his eyes were level with her torso. The plaintiveness of his manner did not hide a silent sea of malice.
“They sent you here to die, after all. Your masters and the five both. You’re here to soften me up.”
Wasn’t it right that the Serpent, who impelled Adam in his pride to fall, had himself a little taste of the fruit of knowledge? Why should he not know these secret things? Her sister sent nothing but whining misery.
“Wouldn’t it be right and proper to turn that sword on them?”
And, God, it would be good. That crusade would never end. Certain defeat had its own appeal. But he had missed one thing: a face over her, cutting her open again and again. Someone to come home to. Her loyalty was not so easily bought.
He had no expectation she would even consider it. She, who dove so deep, would not be turned by a few careful words. His voice overflowed with glee at what would follow.
We do this together, she whispered. The huddled mind of Intentions, spiraling inward, shuddered. Of course. No other way it could be. Her sister steeled herself.
And she sprang upwards. The jets spouting plasma again and he caught her by the ankle as she flew and dervished her into the ground. Her flesh ruptured. Inside, the girl-body’s ribs snapped like twigs.
UP! roared the oath in her head.
She turned and caught a hammering fist with the flat of her blade. It rang as she rose and jabbed, drawing a bare bead of gold from a nick across his cheek. His expression shifted to alertness — did he only now register that the threat was real? He grabbed her by the wrist again, tight enough that sheetmetal crumpled like tin, the bonegrinding noise rumbling in her ears.
You think this stops you? You think anything stops you? Do what we were made to do! The incitements roared hotter against the gale.
She screamed and punched the other fist against his chest where it rebounded and he tightened and all she could think of was his hand, her bones, straining from her flesh all motility. Leaving behind a wrung-out wreck of steel. A ring of fire about her hand. Her fingers were cold and still.
She kicked uselessly at the dirt, casting up sprays of mud and masonry. Feet pinwheeling madly and all her guns opened up symphonic, fire from heaven washing over him to no effect. His head tilted to one side, oblivious to her strikes.
“Why did they expect you to beat me? My lieutenants have grown stupid without my guidance. I shall decorate my new palace with their skins.”
Don’t let him misdirect you. He’s yours.
The sword. Only the sword and the spear mattered. The spear from an archangel and the sword — what, that slew Mammon? By the homeopathic principle, perhaps, a blade that tasted the lesser could bite the greater. She didn’t need to understand. Gritting her teeth she planted both legs while the morningstar lost himself in thought, and —
DO IT.
Twisted her right arm out of its socket in a billow of sparks and oil and whalelymph. The sword fell from the nerveless fingers and Lucifer stood stunned and she dove and caught it in her left hand —
YES. said something, exultant.
Turned to drive it upward —
His knee caught her in the stomach. They flew. The land rushed below. Rivers sinuous like the wind.
I love you. and then they fell.
When she woke she was beyond pain. She tried to stand. A wave of sickness sent her lurching, and her flesh-body vomited acrid oil and mercury. The acid residue coated her tongue.
Her steel-body ended at the midriff. The two legs lay scattered in scraps across the bowl of the valley. Lucifer stood over her, resplendent. He was naked no longer, but bedecked in ceremonial plates of golden-white glass. His blood ran out from the pinprick in his stomach and fountained over him, covering his lower body in parapets and machicolations and frescoes. Brickwork spawned like coral in fastforward.
“Quite the puzzle to return to.” he said, “I have no idea what the point of you is.”
The sword. She still had the sword. Clutched in her one remaining limb, fingers unfeeling in rigor mortis. She could —
The arm twitched involuntarily and he stepped on it casually, grinding it down. Each buckle of metal was a smashed phalange. One leisurely hand plucked it from her fingers which snapped like chalk.
I need— she began, and then her breath left her. What. What what what. Something wrong underpinning the world.
The uplink was dead. But that was nonsense because it was triply secured massively redundant and HOW could it be DEAD and focus. What was the point of her if she couldn’t continue through this. They buttressed her against this failure mode, codependency, and those plans went out the window a long time ago but she would not die here.
Lucifer’s hand blurred. The sword bisected the mass of the frame, splitting it open to reveal the ripe interior. Her chamber gashed open and the girl-body breathed fresh air, and saw the blue sky of her home. Her other senses died. Now she could appreciate the Devil, the hillocks of his brows, nose like a parted mountain. How had she ever thought him beautiful?
He smiled and twirled the sword again, but she had forgotten what she was, because really it was more of a skyscraper, hundreds of metres of steel swiveling on an unholy axis. Each pass of the bladetip foreboded hurricane-squalls that lashed her matted hair into her eyes. She forgot the scale of the world she lived in. Believed herself important. He had shown her.
“I see.” he said, and his voice sans the interpreting algorithms was the splintering of icesheets.
The blade extended horizontally and shone like the sun and detonated with a whipcrack that filled the garden. Molten droplets of metal scattered seven by seven leagues distant. As she lay on her back and looked up one landed squarely on her chest. There was sizzling and sweetness, and there should have been pain, but the nerves were dead.
Something remained when the metal of the blade fell away, at its heart. A slit in the world. She strained to make it out, and he did her the courtesy of appearing in the torn-apart stasis chamber. Meeting her as an equal. Now in a stylish synthetic pilot’s bodysuit. In his right hand —
Another spear. Crudely wrought iron. And its tip was stained.
With —
“God.” she whispered.
“I thought there was something interesting about your sword.” He said the word with four syllables. His grin waxed wide. “Now we know.”
God was veiled from the world. Too perfect to be immersed in its foulness. And everything Lucifer did, all his webbed plots and stratagems, could never puncture that barrier. The Enemy’s rebellion was ever-doomed. For it to succeed he would need — a bridge over the cosmological chasm, a thing of the material world that transgressed into the divine. A mutable weapon that in turn mutated the fixed and eternal. A spear that pierced the side of God.
Lucifer leaned on the Lance of Longinus and unfolded his wings, which were wider than the chamber that contained them, extending nonsensically over the horizon. Perhaps they girdled the world. She stared, rapt, at the fractal ivory pinions. If he struck her she would not flee. Not now.
“Would you like to live, little girl?”
There wasn’t even hate anymore. He just seemed amused. And her throat caught as she opened her mouth. A sigh escaped her, and she thought of Riya, waiting, and it was not enough. Not to stay the course through this. She could not find it in her to beg. See you soon, she thought.
Instead he gave an ironical bow and the feathers fanned downward as a column of gold thunder pierced the false sky of the garden, and then the baked granite of Hell’s false floor. Through the bore he drilled she could see the true stars twinkling. They had turned on their insensate courses for generations. No more. Lucifer had come: to wage war in Heaven.
And she lay back in the boughs of the garden, alone at last. And waited — for what? There was nothing left to wait for. She had managed to put herself beyond all camaraderie. What was left? To think over every choice she ever made, and mire her deeper in her certainty: there was no path but this. She could never have done better. Her own personal Hell.