“The angels stole our beloved Satan,” Moloch answered briskly, then reached for a sullen Armoni, twirled a strand of his pale blonde curls idly.“So our little wars here are on hold.I’ll agree with Baal that we need the devil back before Hell drowns all of us in fire.”At that, Rosier swallowed nervously.“But after that, let’s talk, Asmodeus.”
“It’s suicide to attack Heaven,” Asmodeus grunted.
“Maybe Hell needed a culling anyway,” Moloch laughed as Armoni let out a breath suddenly, pushed past him to hurry into the cell, toward Rosier.
“I’m sorry,” Armoni whispered to the fruit demon as Moloch went for Asmodeus, grabbing his arm, forcing him up to his feet even while Asmodeus groaned sharply in pain, knees bending weakly.“Moloch and his friends held me, wouldn’t let me leave to come help you two.”
But Rosier kissed his cheek quickly, quieted him.“Don’t apologize.I’m happy you’re safe.”
“I worry about what the Watchers are going to do— Rosier, Azazel told me a hundred times that he wanted Satan to suffer, that he wanted revenge.He said he’d love to end Satan’s entire world the way that Satan ended his.”
“Armoni!”Moloch barked as he dragged a limping Asmodeus.“Come follow, or I’ll leave you to the fires.”And so Armoni took Rosier’s hand and followed, tugging along the demon of fruit with him.
At Satan’s tower, Baal loomed over the balcony, shouting out commands at the crowds of thousands upon thousands below — demons and the souls of animals in between.The latter howled and screeched, filling all the gaps between the endless chatter and yelling of the devil’s infernal children.Wooden crates were stacked, tipped over — mountains of armor that demon talons rummaged through, all from Satan’s prepared stock and Moloch’s gathered one.And Moloch put Armoni to work helping to hand it all out to the crowd, trying to gauge their approximate size hastily.There were, however, weapons too.Swords, spears, but firearms, as well, those mass produced for the brutal wars of humanity.The armor, on the other hand, was earthly, but not human.Satan had ordered it all to be fashioned in a dark hue to contrast poetically with the angels’, but it’d been constructed from Earth and Hell materials.None of it was particularly strong — the armor could withstand hellfire but not angel swords; if this battle were to have happened centuries earlier, the demons would have been slaughtered.
But now it would be different.The humans had created just what the demons needed to take on Heaven.Asmodeus couldn’t help but find it terribly appropriate.
When Armoni handed a rifle to Asmodeus, the duke set it on the ground like a walking stick, and Rosier watched Armoni fit gauntlets over his trembling hands.Both of them were armored now, though Asmodeus’ fit him too tight and Rosier’s fit him too large.The demons around were raising their voices in chants, and all the animals howled in solidarity, “Heaven will return Satan to us!”they declared.“Heaven will return our king!Raze Heaven to the ground!”
Asmodeus remembered his words of suicide earlier as he kissed Rosier’s helmet.‘Suicide, hm.’He was quite familiar with that, but this didn’t feel like suicide; he could hardly breathe in the chest plate locked around him like a pair of jaws.There was no autonomy here.‘This is murder.’Satan’s sacrifice.
“I don’t want,” Rosier whispered, “to burn.”In the seas of fire that Revelation promised for the demons.
“The world didn’t end when Christ walked the Earth.It won’t end now,” Asmodeus reassured him.‘I didn’t even end when we left it.’Centuries ago, the never-healing demons had crawled back into Hell and stayed there partly out of Satan’s orders and partly because of humanity’s rapidly advancing weaponry.Once demonic intimidation and strength could no longer protect them, Earth became too much of a risk for most.He and Rosier had never stopped visiting, of course, despite Satan’s laws.They’d watched how, several times, the apocalypse had almost come, then quietly receded; Rosier believed it each time.
Sitting with Asmodeus once, staring at the ruins of an empire, at the dead devastated by the disease of conquest, Rosier had whispered, ‘Sometimes I wonder if the apocalypse is not one moment, one day, but it’s all of them put together.The world ending, over and over.’
Baal finally led a third of Hell out into the Earth.Though he could fly, the others were made to scale up one of the endless canyons into the place of damnation that’d eventually give way into the underwater caves.As they did, the flesh of sinners followed, howling after them in their agony and blooming like flesh-flowers at their feet.Hurriedly, then, the demons climbed and when they began to reach the waters of a sea, they held their breaths and continued onward, swimming despite the weight of their new armor.Light streamed in through the murky blue, shimmering onto the faraway surface.Demons swam in its direction, toward the sharp and round bottoms of docked ships, as well as toward the limbs of humans standing in the water.There wasn’t much animal life in the sea that they passed; the fish had rushed to hide from the invasion.
Rosier was slow to reach the ocean.Another duke had taken Asmodeus and insisted on helping him stay closer to the head of the march, and Rosier had quickly lost sight of Armoni, Moloch, even Baal.But he didn’t mind straying behind, to see the demons eclipse him and rise hastily to pull themselves out of the water.From here, Rosier could hear the muffle of screams, then of banging — and the bottoms of boats rocking from one side to another.Sudden splashes of red smoked the water above, trailing toward Rosier, who floated in the sea like litter.It wasn’t long before his lungs began to burn, but he’d been burning for a long time, and he was used to pain; he could drown forever.Nonetheless, Rosier began to kick his armored feet, feeling the pull of his sword against his back, trying to weigh him back down.But he continued, and he began to wrestle his arms against the water until the blood and the light at the surface reached him, until he felt it all bubble in his mouth.When Rosier broke through, it was like an embryo from an egg.“Hah,” he breathed, but didn’t hear himself over the sound of slaughter.
Demons, killing first the humans whose attention had been on the hovering stars overhead, then lunging at those who tried to intervene.
Clumsily, Baal took out some innocents with the mace — some men, some women, a child maybe — intent to keep his hands away from his guns until they’d reached Heaven.But he grinned when the beating of hooves sounded among all the screams.Angels.Panting out saltwater, he turned up at a blood-crimson moon and the burning spheres of stars above the city they’d arrived in.Babylon.There had been no more than a hundred or so humans in the water, but thousands were retreating from the shore, many falling, many sure to be dead not by the demons’ weapons but by stampede, caught beneath shoes or suffocated against locked doors.When the angels descended on their winged horses, Baal saw that they carried swords and spears, and he had to bite down a laugh.There were only some dozens of angels, many of them immediately yanking on the reins of their steeds, as if at the first realization that they were horrifically outnumbered.Baal couldn’t help a chuckle this time, as he ordered: “Take their horses!And we will ride into Heaven!”
“Traitors!”shouted a demon.“Cowardly shits!”
At the shore, Asmodeus barely managed to wrestle away from the demon that held him before an angel galloped by, swung a sword that cut apart the back of the other duke’s throat and narrowly missed Asmodeus’ unarmored head.Staggering away, splattered in blood, Asmodeus sourly thought,‘I don’t want to die for Satan.’He considered running, finding Rosier and taking off somehow, but his legs were still so weak.Another angel swung a sword, and he ducked just in time to see a demon fling a dagger in the direction of the attacker, hit right at one of his wings, before five, six demons swarmed him.Like insects devouring a speck of food, the demons drowned the angel in their crowding, pulling the screeching horse down alongside the angel.All around Asmodeus, the same happened to each of the angels; one attempted to retreat only for a demon, taking the chain of a captured angel, to fling it out at them like a whip and bring him down.
“Asmodeus!”
The duke of lust twisted his head and sighed in relief at Rosier, who was running to him, trying to keep his head down.Swallowing, Asmodeus blurted, “Rosier, you were right,” just as the younger demon reached him, touched him, gripped his robes tight in a modern world they had no right to be in.“It’s all already ended.It’s all ended a hundred thousand times.”He squeezed Rosier’s hand, and fought the urge to kiss him, before he saw another angel being pulled down and beat, and stripped, and Asmodeus hurried for the horse even when Rosier tried to stop him.“No— Come with me!Hurry!”‘Darling.Let’s see Heaven again.You and me.Isn’t that what you always wanted?To go home?’
Baal took the sword of the first angel that the demons had swarmed, and he climbed onto a panicking horse before he took the reins tight with one hand.Pressing the sword against the heavenly animals’ throat, he ordered, “To Heaven.”It thrashed, kicked up its hind legs, for just a second, then screeched when the blade dipped in enough to stream blood.“To Heaven!”It was more than an order that time — a rallying war cry for the demons that began to hurry onto the other horses and lift their weapons.There were not enough horses for all the demons, even if three, four, five shared one, but the rest pillaged the angels, taking their armor, weapons, and already running back to Hell.Hundreds would still be able to reach Heaven, and it would be enough to raid the heavenly city without its army.For the third time, he rallied: “All you demons — to Heaven!”Sword pointed to the skies, Baal felt the horse kick once last time.
The damned cheered, and those on the steeds of angels followed the regent of Hell as he rose up into the sky, avoiding the dark clouds and fallen stars.
In Heaven, Phanuel was in the barracks, seated, gnawing on the inside of his cheeks, eye following the figure of Michael as he approached the exit at the other end of the hall.He’d been listening to the chief prince and the devil, but he hadn’t caught any of the noises that he did that first time his friend had entered with nothing more than a fruit.In other words, he hadn’t heard them fuck again, but perhaps they had chosen to sin more quietly today.The events from before the war for Heaven were so distant that he could hardly remember them, but while listening, he’d suddenly thought of the parties that Lucifer would host in Michael’s home, and how the two had been so inseparable, how they would sit with their legs tangled without shame in front of all the angels.Nostalgia should have struck at him, and yet it didn’t.He found himself unable to enjoy any of those memories, as if he’d been silently miserable.Michael may be a prisoner of nostalgia, but Phanuel wasn’t.
Michael stopped with one foot already outside, the brilliance of Heaven pouring in.He, softly, said: “I will be with God.”
Phanuel whispered, “You always are.”
The chief prince said nothing in return, but his shame may as well have crept out from his back like a pair of wings, one of his seraphic six.Breathing in slow, Phanuel watched the door shut.He moved to lock it, afterwards, as he’d always been instructed to do.
At the open gates of Heaven, Rosier stared up at the eternally tall pillars of pearl, then at each of the twelve precious stones that adorned the walls.Like fog, clouds were at the feet of all the horses, and as Baal rode in quickly, swinging his mace at the nearest angel, one only adjusting a pebble, to have his morning star bash at his head.Its teeth jabbed into the side of his jaw, then pulled back enough to rip out some skin, some bone — throwing the stranger to the ground with a gurgled yell.Rosier, holding the reins with Asmodeus behind him, avoided the sight even when the horse beneath trotted forward, not allowing Rosier the chance to lag behind as he’d done in the water.Unwillingly, he saw Heaven.‘Home.’But, unwillingly, he saw no such home.
Rifle cocked in his hands, Asmodeus lifted his chin, craned his neck, counting each simple house they passed and every new cathedral that hadn’t been there when they lived here.No angel can memorize Heaven — it resists — but the oldest had come very close.As an angel, Asmodeus had familiarized with all the most important faces of it, and its whims, and he’d had a rough count of the amount of things relative to other things, however much that changed each second.There had been more homes, more bathhouses, more galleries, more observatories, than there’d ever been places to worship.Angels had almost never worshiped before Lucifer, who taught them to adore it, to adore God.How to be thankful when you’d never known life without pleasure?‘What have they done with you, Heaven?’he thought as he aimed the rifle at some angels trying to hurry into their homes in confusion.Before Rosier could stop him, he pulled the trigger, grunted at the recoil against his fragile shoulders.Angels couldn’t drop dead, but a bullet could still pierce, could still throw them back to splatter red from the back of their bodies against a wall.Angels could still scream and run.
