We twirled through ordinary time, to an ordinary song. But when I licked dry lips, they tasted of celestial honey and unanswered questions.
It should have been the perfect night.
Chapter 25
Archon Seraphael, Angel King
They say the breath of God is like ozone, that it leaves a stinging charge on the skin and a ringing in the ears that you never quite recover from. But the summoning that tore through my wings and set my bones to humming was nothing so gentle. It was the wrench of gravity at the event horizon, the memory of stars collapsing, the silent scream that cleaved the void when the Word first spoke and spun the dark into something more.
I stood at the threshold of the Creator’s audience, a corridor whose walls and floor and ceiling were nothing but the curdled, living light of Heaven’s innermost sanctum. The hall ran in both directions into infinity, but ahead, at the impossible vanishingpoint, pulsed a heartbeat that called my name. My wings, vast and white and impossible for any human to perceive, bristled with a thousand eyes. Each eye, in its own way, begged me to turn back. I did not. Disobedience in my line of work, was rarely an option.
I walked.
With each step, I felt the weight of the assignment I had just left behind. I had come from the earth, from a mating ceremony that echoed ancient rites, but the taste of celestial honey had barely faded from my tongue before I was ripped out of the world and deposited here, alone, to account for myself. I knew what this was. I knew I was being summoned to judgment.
At the hall’s center, suspended in the air, was the very presence of the Creator—a column of golden radiance that spanned worlds, at once blinding and so intimate that it hollowed you out from the inside. The light didn’t burn; it obliterated. It erased everything about you that wasn’t essential, that wasn’t precisely, painfully true.
I dropped to one knee, my seven-foot frame suddenly small as a wishbone. My head bent; my hair, platinum and heavy, spilled over my brow and fell in a pale curtain that glimmered in the radiance. My wings flared behind me, then drooped, ashamed.
The voice of the Creator was not a voice at all. It was a pressure, a Truth that vibrated my atoms and left me gasping. It pressed from within and without.
ARCHON, the voice thundered. YOU HAVE COME.
“I answer, as I always have,” I said, though my words were less sound than arrangement of intention. “I am yours, as you will.”
YOU BROKE THE GREAT LAW.
I tried to look up, but failed. “I did not intend—”
INTENTION IS IRRELEVANT. YOU TOUCHED THE MORTAL. YOU LOVED HER.
A soundless shudder passed through me. “I… Yes. I loved her.”
FOR THIS, YOU HAVE BEEN SUMMONED.
My wings curled forward, a shield and a penance. I had known this was coming since the moment I first saw Laurel Waters through the haze of an Indian summer, her hair damp from the river, her laughter more holy than any chorus. I had known it would come to this.
I waited.
A beat passed, the silence dense as a neutron star. Then: THE CHILD.
My golden eyes flickered. “Aspen Waters.” I tasted the name; it tasted of sunlight and wildflowers. “She is… She is good, my lord. I did not know she was of me. I swear this.”
THE CHILD CARRIES THE SEED OF DIVINITY. THIS IS AN ABOMINATION.
The light flared, each photon a blade of judgment. For a moment I feared I would be sundered, made into ash, but then the intensity receded, like a storm’s eye passing overhead.
“You made me your enforcer,” I said, voice shaking. “You tasked me with the work that Gabriel and Michael would not do. I hunted the wicked, the abominations, the half-made things. I was your sword. I was loyal. I am fallen, but not forsaken.”
YOU WERE MADE TO OBEY.
“And I have obeyed. Even in this—” my hands trembled, my hair clinging to my cheek “—I did not know, my lord. I did not know that the witch Laurel carried a child. I left her as I knew I must. She died before I could—” The words turned to dust. “I obeyed.”
The Creator’s presence built upon itself, pressure magnifying with the mercy of a red giant collapsing to diamond.His sorrowful caress, that question—Did you think I would not know?—hung in the vesper-bright air as the throne room began to pulse with a new frequency of light. I could not stand upright. My wings, those great ivory banners, curled inward as if to shield my soul from what was to come.
I felt every atom in my borrowed vessel turn to music—each note a chord of regret, longing, and the kind of love that can destroy creation. The marble floor liquefied into a marble sea, rippling with the reverberations of the Voice. My face pressed against it, and it did not yield. Nothing of me, not angel nor memory nor desire, was permitted to rise above the tide of that Presence.
When the Voice returned, it came as wind and rumor, as the taste of salt and myrrh. “You grieve for her, Seraphael.” The words held neither blame nor comfort, only the impossible gravity of truth.
