Dina, finally, set a foot down, then kicked off of it, falling into the abyss he’d been in before.Folding his wings close, the plunge was fast, terrifying.But freeing.As the air rushed past, into his mouth, his hair fluttering behind him, his blood trickling in beads upward — he almost felt good.Free falling felt good.He could see light below him, violent and warm.The sea serpent that had pulled him to Hell with a smaller monster strangling it, trying to hold its fire away from whatever was below even if it meant burning them both.“Tadeo!”Dina screamed.“Tadeo!”
The anti-Christ twisted his horrible face up, and he shouted back, “Dina!Help me!”His grip on the Leviathan was slipping, and soon it was thrashing again, no longer breathing fire, trying to shake off Tadeo with harsh whips of its body.
“We must go!”Dina stretched out his wings and fluttered them, feeling each feather shift.“Fly up with me!We must go!”
“Angel!”
Dina turned back, saw Baal, breath reeling in.He put up his hands and swerved, trying to dodge the mace, succeeding again only enough that the spike of the starry sphere dragged at his forearm, yanked back to pull out a chunk of skin.Blood, again.Pain, again.By now, the angel could only whimper in the pain, realizing how hoarse his throat was from screaming.He kicked, trying to jerk his body away as the Regent of Hell reeled back the sphere, swung the chain around behind him.Dina squinted frightfully, realizing he was trapped between a sea serpent beast below and the horned one above.He had been wrong to run away.He should have listened to Baal when he could.He shouldn’t have come here.Baal threw the star of the mace out at him again.
Then — Dina was tugged backward, behind something, and a clawed, charred hand went where his face had been.The claws caught the sphere, each of its spikes poking through the fingers, the palm, even an eye at the back of the wrist.Almost consumed by the feathers of too many wings, Tadeo tightened his grip on it, then yanked down, pulling the suddenly-pale Baal down before he could let go of the handle of the mace.The demon did release it, then tried to beat his ancient, featherless wings.Mercifully, Tadeo didn’t pursue Baal before the Leviathan began screeching again, and heat began rapidly approaching from below.“Fly,” the angel whispered, feeling one of Tadeo’s other hands gripping the back of his shirt.“Fly, Tadeo!”
Baal retreated, swerving into a crevice in the dark walls of the abyss, and the anti-Christ dropped the mace, hand bleeding until the blood dried, and instantly, the cuts sewed closed, and he breathed out to feel the burnt of him began to chip away into the darkness.Tadeo, obediently, beat all his wings, pulling Dina up with him, who was fluttering his own wings and trying to keep up.How far above was the place they’d fallen from?Tadeo couldn’t think, couldn’t even guess.Panting, panting, all the pain of what he’d suffered in the last hours was fogging his head.Groaning, grunting, all he could do was bear it.He would have to cry it out, like a child, but not yet, not now.He listened to instinct, to flap all his wings faster, faster, until he was nearly dragging Dina.Maybe the abyss would go on forever, but he would have to keep flying up to escape the flames for his own dignity if nothing else.
He was in pain.So much pain.The world was spinning.The pain.Beat after beat of wings.He must listen to his instincts, the beast inside him that could have had a mind of its own.It was bleeding with him.‘Tadeo, keep flying.Up, up.’May they arrive in Heaven.The pain.In Heaven, there must be no pain.
“There, Tadeo!”
In the darkness, he had the angel guide him, through what must’ve been a gap in the rock ceiling, then through a narrowing channel that Dina climbed in through first.Tadeo followed, folding all his wings inside his body with a groan of pain that he couldn’t fight tears over now.Each new mouth and eye on him shut, then began to heal over, pale like scars.As the rock around him crushed him, he tried and tried to grow smaller.He crawled, crawled.Without even realizing it, he was beginning to choke on water, but his lungs were already full of blood.Just as the ocean cave eased up on him, the anti-Christ began to limp, no longer able to trudge along even when the angel called his name.Celestial arms came over a humanizing, naked body, then Tadeo shut his eyes, feeling the angel use his wings to toughly push themselves up faster through the water.
When they finally arrived to the surface and night sky, Dina embraced Tadeo tightly, choking up on either the sea or tears — regardless, it was salty — and he rubbed his face against the boy’s drenched hair.He kicked weakly, trying to bring the anti-Christ to the distant shore.Calm, the tide pushed them gently, encouragingly.Half an hour it took, so long that Tadeo was gurgling and stirring by the time Dina was finally able to pull them out of freezing water onto cold sand.“Tadeo, Tadeo,” he was crying, “Tadeo.”
The anti-Christ could feel nothing but the angel collapsing on top of him, weeping for his dear angel friends that he’d somehow abandoned by doing this.Not understanding, Tadeo simply laid there, his body healed but aching everywhere.It was such pain that he almost wanted to hurt himself just to feel in control of the agony for a mere second.“Angel,” he croaked, and Dina hugged him tighter, before Tadeo blinked, began to see the crescent moon over them.“That was… We were…” His voice was throaty, still burned.“The Leviathan….And…” His heart petrified, fell.“Dante.”
Dina tensed over him, then lifted his body slowly, faced him with all the fright of Heaven and Earth.
“We left Dante,” Tadeo breathed, “in Hell.”
CHAPTER19
It was revenge what Asmodeus had done.Petty, perhaps, but it was always the little things that infuriated Baal the most, and if Asmodeus couldn’t kill him, then the least he could do was send the regent of Hell into a rage.Obediently, Asmodeus had said, “I’ll bind his hands,” about that angel Dina, gesturing for Baal to lead the way to Satan’s tower, and that stupid, stupid Baal had nodded and hastily moved on ahead.‘Dumb fucking dog.’A single twist of the screw, just loose enough that the weepy, bleeding angel should realize that he wasn’t really restrained if he tugged at the cuffs once or twice.Maybe Baal would catch the angel instantly, but he’d at least be annoyed.If Asmodeus couldn’t kill him, he could irritate him.If he couldn't send Baal to Hell, then he could make his life one.
Currently, the demon was moving in between a crowd, in some other part of the underworld, one foot beginning to drag no matter how many iron bars he’d attached to the calf bones to try to force his body to accept it.One of his hands kept twitching, looking for his typical cane.All about him, there was pale fog, and the rock ground was warm with blood.Demons were all rushing in opposite directions, but that didn’t stop claws from grazing his arms, then a voice saying, “Duke, do you know what’s happening by the tower?”
“No,” replied Asmodeus.“Baal must’ve fucked something up.”
Then, he continued on his way in the all-encompassing, blinding paleness, ignoring the stench carried on its back.Behind, he heard the demon call for him again, curiously, but Asmodeus ignored it.He ignored all the chatter of demons around him, as well, and he ignored the distant howls and groans of the tortured dead.However, at one particular gurgling noise, the duke couldn’t stop himself from turning his face upward to examine a bubbling, pulsing mass of wet redness.Whatever it hung from — the ceiling — was lost in darkness and the fog, but Asmodeus knew it had a wide base and a sharp peak, almost like a limb reaching down.A pyramid of flesh.Yet — any squinting demon would notice faces, mouths wretched open as if in screams peppered upon its body.Some loose limbs dangled from the pyramid of flesh, but from the neck downward, the individuality of bodies, of the victims, melted into one blended mass.
How terrible.Asmodeus had really not wanted to return here so soon.He missed the city he’d been living with Rosier, and he missed the sunsets, and he missed the technology, and the convenience of food, labor, and other kinds of service work.In Hell, one can’t order a meal on command as easily, even a duke.Of course, Asmodeus was not always fond of the socio-economic situation for contemporary humanity — even as an outsider who could reap the benefits and none of the consequences — but he was not an angel, he didn’t bother to cast a judgement on them.He never missed Rosier’s downtrodden expression reflected off a passenger's seat window, however, when the younger demon looked at the state of the Earth.
In the present, Asmodeus found himself alone, all the demons disappeared into the dense fog.He could hear the shuffling of their feet and the pain of the flesh pyramid above, but now it was silence also echoing in his skull.If there was anything worse than the loudness of Hell, it was when it grew quiet.Slow, he turned his head, wondering of the abyss angel Dina had fallen through.He listened for it, heard the usual tumbling of rock and dust, but also the whip of a falling thing.The angel again?He turned his head up, saw the flesh mound.A corpse hand was reaching down for him and, without thinking, he took it.
The pyramid of flesh pulled Asmodeus up, and he set his good foot upon it — clawed— and then the flimsy human one.He breathed, rolling one shoulder, as the direction of gravity turned upside down.Letting go of the corpse hand, he trekked cautiously, hearing the squelches and agony wails beneath his feet.They faded into the usual noise of Hell as he continued onward— the dark fall where the angel might be.To pass the time, he kept thinking of his beloved husband.
Marriage always helped to lift the fallen angel of fruit’s spirits, and Asmodeus was already itching to host another quiet wedding somewhere, to fall into a fantasy where the two of them were humans and wishing love until death meant something.During their most recent honeymoon, Rosier had laid over Asmodeus’ chest and confessed that he occasionally dreamed that they had never been angels, that they might’ve been childhood friends turned adult lovers, that they had families and heritage and graves waiting for their rot.The duke had never understood the craving, especially from someone so oriented toward fruits, trees, nature.
‘Do you ever hate the humans?’Asmodeus had asked.
‘I wish I could,’ Rosier had confessed softly.
‘You should hate them.If they weren’t hopeless, they wouldn’t all be in Hell.’
‘Not all of them are there.And there’s this old woman who runs a shop with her granddaughter next door… I think they're good people, Asmodeus.I really hope so.’
One night, Asmodeus had caught the smaller demon sitting on the sidewalk, sniffling between hushed, raw cries, cigarette in one hand, saying he wished they’d never met.‘I love you,’ Asmodeus had said, ‘if we hadn’t met, I don’t know what I'd be doing.We’ve always been beside each other, Rosier.It's always been you and me.I don’t even know who Iamoutside of you.But?—’
‘If you ever leave me, I’ll die,’ Rosier had wept.‘You put your roots in me, and now I depend on them to breathe.If only we had never met— If only I didn’t need you more than I need my own heart.’
Creeping behind him, a few limbs of the pyramid were brushing past Asmodeus, reaching out into the dark canyon.He, simply, watched as the flesh-hands reached out to push a falling person, then grab at him, reel him into the gap in the wall where Asmodeus stood.To the duke's feet, the thing, thisperson, was dragged to, then left for him as the peak of the pyramid itself retreated.“Hm,” the duke said at what he was sure was dead.
