Michael set his jaw, but he remained silent, unwilling to place himself on the path of God’s condemnation again.Instead, he listened to Gabriel’s quiet, trembling words: “Father, you can’t have extended humans’ time on Earth for so long without reason.Why grant them millenniums after Christ’s death only to destroy them now?”
“Gabriel,” Raphael called, hushed, “you shouldn’t question our Father.”It was an odd phrase to hear from him, one Uriel normally would have been the one to hiss.Raphael was always very quiet before God, the anchor between Uriel’s cutting strictness, Gabriel’s bright curiosity, and Michael’s steady obedience.Perhaps, Raphael wanted to fill the silence that Uriel had left behind by rebelling.Michael wondered whether Raphael would ever speak for all of them, if he were the last one left.
But Gabriel shook his head.“My Lord, the apocalypse would bring about too much suffering.”
Metatron’s voice rang out instead of God’s.“The Lord offered His only Son to save mankind from suffering.It is only through the apocalypse that they may rise to paradise.”
And Michael thought, distantly, that Metatron — standing now at God’s left hand, watched curiously by the quiet choir — was so much like the Uriel he once knew, the Uriel who had shoved and snapped at the chief prince to remove his gaze from beautiful Lucifer.
“Only through the apocalypse,” Uriel said, low and bitter, “can the soul of man rise to replace us.”
“Silence,” Metatron snarled.“You have no right to speak after sending one of our own to the stars and now to Earth.”
“Dina is not one of your own,” Uriel replied.“He’s an angel.”
Raphael tried to cut in — “Metatron, please,” — and darted forward to stand between the wheels and Uriel’s battered form.“This isn’t about the angel Dina.We’ll send someone after him soon.This is about the end of the Earth, if it’s truly to come this time.”
“Why?”Gabriel whispered, almost to himself.“Why, why, why now?”His deep frown, the quiver of his lips, and even the tilt of his eyebrows were nearly visible through the feathers veiling his face, but what couldn’t be seen could be felt.All around them, there was only feeling, the sensation of soft wings, scorching fire, the tremble of the harp strings from God’s choir.
Michael faced them again — plain, beautiful angels with their heads bowed, fear and confusion etching onto faces meant for praise.‘What are you doing here?’They looked lost, almost humanly so.And Michael began to wish he’d brought his sword, something solid to hold — the weapon’s hilt like the hand of a friend.A blink, then all the light around them fractured like stained glass.Mirages emerged in every direction around them in the shapes of chairs, thrones — stacked as an endless tunnel — all empty and eager.
Then, the Lord’s voice, vast, tender, unendurable: “Why now?Because I know their deeds.It is written that some have persevered and endured but have forsaken my love.But to whoever is victorious in hearing of my spirit, I offer the right to eat from the Tree of Life and join me in paradise.And I know of affliction and poverty.I know, too, of the church where Satan has his throne.I know of the prophet adulators whose children I will strike dead.Those dressed in white are to walk with me; their names are already written in the book of life.Listen to my words, for they are holy and true.The new Jerusalem will descend from Heaven.I know each deed of the churches on Earth.The rich who say they need not a thing, but I know they are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked.It is only those whom I love that I rebuke and discipline.I stand at the door and wait for the knock.Those who are earnest and repent will come in to eat with me.They will be with me.”
At His word, the thrones filled, but not by angels.Figures of age — flesh stringing into the form of elders, of bodies like Enoch’s before his transformation; and there were twenty four of them by the Throne.The choir didn’t look to them, but they began to sing in four voices, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.”The elders chanted with them: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and powers, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.”
Yet, Michael’s gaze wandered — to Metatron, the conglomerate of burned chariots, then to Uriel, who remained unyielding, and lastly to his siblings Raphael and Gabriel, who maintained trembling devotion.Wings and light crowded around them, as if the totality of all that was occurring here had to swell in size to contain itself.More voices were joining, and the song grew until it was no longer song at all but a living creature, a beast.
In His right hand, the Lord revealed a scroll, not of parchment but of flesh and blood.And it dripped gold from its seven seals to leak into the choir’s mouths.But Uriel cried out, raw and furious: “Who is worthy to break those seals and open the scroll?No one in Heaven, God.No one on Earth or under the Earth can!”A lurch of pain in Michael’s throat tore up pearls from his eyes, almost blood, nearly tears.
“Do not dare weep!”thundered Metatron.“See the Lion has triumphed.He will come to us now.He will open the scroll and every seal.”Michael’s heart was not within him; there were no beats to stagger or stop; he was nothing; he didn’t like to be nothing, he wanted flesh, needed to be gripped at his hilt and wielded.“Bow all for the savior the Lord has granted us!The Lamb!”
Then Michael saw a Lamb, appearing before them as if slipping from the fingers of a great hand between the angels — hundreds now, thousands — and God.As if slain, he lay limply, one leg swaying before it touched the center of creation’s crown, then he opened one golden eye, the same shade of sunlight as his hair, streaming like burst stars.In shackles of every precious stone —jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, beryl, topaz, jacinth, and amethyst, and every other — and in a fine woven tunic and hefty robe, he stood.The Lamb, bloodied like he had withstood the rain and flood of slaughter.Or like he had just been born.Beautiful, still.
The choir angels sang for the perfect Lamb, who limped, wounded at the head and at the heart to bleed onto his own feet.Strumming their hearts, the singer urged, “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain.”When they fell before him, it was to prostrate, as if the Lamb was their idol.
‘Lucifer?’Michael felt as if he’d faded into pure light.No mouth, no touch — he was reduced to a witness.‘Satan.Lucifer.’Here he was, combing his hair with fingers as the incense smoke of golden bowls reached him; here he was, his face in a drowsy, young expression with half-lidded eyes, lips slightly parted.‘Lucifer, how have you come here?’The chief prince flickered his gaze in every direction, but no one was shouting, ‘Devil!Cast him down, Michael!’Why did no one see that the Lamb was the devil, the great opponent of God?‘Why are they not afraid?Why does no one see you how I do?’
“And with your blood,” the choir angels praised, “you purchased for God souls from every tribe and nation.You have made them a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they shall reign on the Earth!”The highest Heaven was now too dense in souls, in people, in all of the fears scalding and skinning Michael’s very soul.Ten thousand times ten thousand angels circled the Throne, an ocean of wings, faces.Michael could no longer tell one voice from another — the hymn of the choirs and elders, of all the living creatures, became the pulse of a single divine heart.God’s heart.We are all the Lord’s organ, His very body.“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!”
The chief prince of Heaven strained to see Raphael, Gabriel, or Uriel in the hoard of life, crushing against one another, so close to bursting out, beginning all of time anew.But he could not.His gaze remained on Lucifer alone, the Lamb.He was taking the scroll from his Father’s giving hand before turning back to face Michael.He looked curious for a flicker, then smiled wide enough to squint his golden eyes with all his familiar, ruinous grace.He was mirage, illusion — this slain Lamb.But his lips shaped around a single word, ‘Michael.’
Michael remembered: he had been born to God with a lamb in his arms.
“To Him,” sang all the angels, “who sits on the Throne, and to the Lamb, be praised for your glory and power!Forever and ever!Amen!”
“Come,” said Lucifer, the Lamb, to Michael, the prince and saint, as creation convulsed, and they sunk into a collapsed spectacle of worship.“Come and see!”
CHAPTER8
Dina could very well remember how Apsinthos had guided him to avoid the bird-shaped, enormous metal beasts whizzing past by having the angel fly through the clouds — in utter pale blindness, in suffocating, freezing humidity.Often, he would pop his head out from the top of the white cotton mountains, silver eyes pointed upwards.Apsinthos would hiss, ‘Don’t look at them.’But Dina would watch the airplanes swim by overhead, his mouth opening to make a childish noise of awe.He’d even squint to try to look through the pinhole windows, but he had yet to make any human out of it.‘I want to see one,’ he’d think excitedly.‘Beautiful humans, beautiful humans.’Princesses, princes, cupids, sirens; he wanted to catch one, if even from the corner of his eye.
Apsinthos, eventually, had instructed Dina to descend where the air grew a little drier, warmer.To do so, Dina tilted his fluttering wings, plunging quickly into the night, partly longing for the star to say, ‘What a good job you’ve done, Dina.What a perfect angel you are.Your obedience is greater than anyone’s.’But Apsinthos spoke only of the end.And it’d be wrong to say that Dina hadn’t asked himself, after being released from Metatron’s cage for more than a few hours, if he really wanted the apocalypse, especially after remembering that Uriel had explicitly wanted the world not to end.Apsinthos hadn’t reacted to Uriel’s pleading in the seconds before the young angel had escaped Heaven, and Dina kept waiting for him to do so — though it’d been days already since he’d left, surely.He wasn’t certain.The sun ran from the angel, leaving him in its bright dust without a helping hand of time; was it daybreak or nightfall that Dina chased?
Finally, Dina was able to see humans.After his descent, he settled in a sort of place he’d never seen before.The stout buildings were not unfamiliar, and he had seen, in illustrations, something akin to horseless carriages — fueled by dark ink that they bled out in smoke — though the vehicles he encountered on the road were far stranger.Turning his head one way, then another, following the distant sound of voices.A lovely four-legged animal trotted ahead — a hairless dog — and insects were humming somewhere.Dina peeked around a corner to a bustling street, humans chattering beside a bright building with outside seating and a rotating, inverted triangle of blood red meat.A man was sawing at its sides, then dropping the slices to a thin circle of corn.Momentarily, it was foreign — the scents, the food — but the longer Dina stared, the more familiar it became.Uriel had once bemoaned that all that humans had created were mere imitation of angel creations, and all that they created, that weren’t derivatives of angels, were pure wickedness.
Uriel, the prince whose hand felt right against Dina’s face.Uriel, who didn’t want the world to end.The very same archangel whom Apsinthos continued to ignore.
Ahead, a man called out to the mysterious figure at the end of the street, and Dina’s heart jolted.And Apsinthos told him not to speak to them before Dina turned on his heel.Like the sun, he ran, heading nowhere.When he’d found the house that Tadeo would fight him in, Dina had hurried inside, all the dreams of meeting humanity fading for a second, replaced by a sudden horror that he couldn’t place.
