Trying to speak through the tightness in his chest, Satan dismissed: “He protected you.You're safe.That’s what he would have wanted.We should—” voice almost cracking, but he picked at the glass of the window pane once more, ignored the burn in his mouth, ignored Baal’s pained, regretful eyes, and Rosier’s emptiness.“We should look for any other casualties and think of what can still be done.”
Baal’s voice was quiet, tense.“Is that all?”He looked at Satan darkly.“Is that all you’ll say?”
A flare of anger, burning away the grief, the confusion, the denial, with irritation.“You want me to grieve?”But his voice still shook.“For someone who hated me almost as much as I hated him?I don’t shed tears for anyone; I’m like God.And he chose this.” Looking away, Satan felt Baal bristle.“And unless we act now, we’ll lose more of us.”
But Baal didn’t submit.“He fell, Lucifer, because of you.”
“He fell because of what he did.”
“We all fell because of you.”
“Baal,” Satan said, stricter.“Now isn't the time.”
Hollowly, Rosier stared, peering at the devil through his dark fringe, fingers drenched in red as he continued latching onto Asmodeus’ hand, but there was nothing in him except confusion, loneliness.Almost childishly, he wanted to ask where Asmodeus was, when he'd be back.‘Let him return soon.We have a home to find and live in.’Where was Asmodeus?Where was the voice Rosier heard as often as his own?Where was Asmodeus?In his grip, as just an arm.
Armoni, suddenly, broke through some of the crowding ahead, hurried toward Rosier without paying any mind to Satan or his regent in a quiet, furious standoff.He lowered himself, touched Rosier, who twitched in half-recognition; he was seeing Asmodeus’ face, he was hearing his voice.‘Darling Rosier, let’s marry again.’He didn’t move; he dreamed awake of a demon of lust, a fallen angel, who’d dragged him down from Heaven with him.But the blonde angel whispered, “Moloch told me— He saw what happened—” A gasp shot out of his mouth at the sight of the arm in Rosier’s hands.“Oh no.Oh no…” When he took Rosier gently and began tugging him upward, the demon hardly felt it.“Come, come with me.”
He continued to ignore Baal and Satan, wrapping his arms tighter around the demon of fruit; and as Armoni led Rosier away, the devil didn’t stop them.
In Heaven, Michael learned of the devil’s tower rising to the Earth from Enoch, who’d heard it from God.Then, he’d made his way through a destroyed, quiet Heaven to the barracks, though not without fastening flasks of the Lamb’s blood to his hip.He did it to tell Phanuel that he would be in charge of the injured angels and the wreck the demons had left of the city.“You know why I’m leaving this in your hands.”Just as he opened the same door that his old friend had left unlocked for Baal to barge in and kidnap Satan, Michael heard Phanuel step closer to him.Michael twitched, then turned back as if Phanuel could see him through the helmet.
“No,” said Phanuel, simply, in the same hoarse whisper as always.“No, I won’t do that.”
“I’m,” the archangel replied, “your chief prince, and you will listen.If I were crueler, I would step out and tell everyone, all the angels of God, what you’ve done.”
“Go, Michael,” urged Phanuel instead.“Go to Earth.I don’t want to hear from you now, and no one outside these barracks wants to hear from you either.”He stepped closer, and he leaned in with a stern, irritated face, added, “How many times should I try to reason with you?When I saw the devil, strung up inside the room next door, I didn’t see Satan, Michael.I saw Lucifer.”
“He deceives you,” Michael hissed.“He’s the devil, Phanuel!”
“You can’t be reasoned with,” Phanuel said, then he shook his head, a flash of pain passing over his ivy-green eyes that made something within Michael shift uncomfortably.“The devil is more honest than you.Even when my own face was torn off, Satan didn’t try to make me believe that he did it righteously.Butyou, Michael?You’ve destroyed Heaven and Earth and dared to try and convince us that any of this could be good.”
“It is good!” Michael insisted in a sudden, shrill panic, shoving his friend back so harsh that the forgiving angel was thrown against the stone wall, and he let out a hack of pain.“That is what you don’t understand, Phanuel!I follow God, and His word is good.If you think that goodness comes from anything other than His word, then you’ve come to believe Satan!”
Phanuel shuddered, and his jaw tightened, before he replied: “It’s my heart that I believe, and it’s a heart that has ached more than loved ever since the war.It aches to see what you have done and what the Lord has allowed to happen.How much longer must I hurt for God to be pleased, brother?And how much love can the Lord ever offer for us to forgive His apocalypse?How can any promise make up for this atrocity?"
Michael clenched his teeth, frustration a furnace in him.“I must leave,” he managed to grit out, “but when I return— You will pay penance for what you’ve said."
“There’s no need.I will never speak again,” Phanuel promised.“Goodbye, now, prince.I hope you finally rid yourself of guilt by killing Satan and yourself.I hope you will find peace.I wish that for the both of you.”Shoving Michael aside, so hard that even the strongest angel of all stumbled, Phanuel stepped out of the barracks, into the eternal light of Heaven, the divine paradise with bullet casings littering the ground.Angels collected them curiously, asking one another what they were, what the demons had wielded.What is all this that the humans have made?What have they done?
‘The humans have made weapons far more destructive than the angels,’ Michael wanted to tell them, but they wouldn’t dare to look at him.‘They have exterminated animals on Earth, and they have exterminated some of their own.They are closer to God now than angels ever were.’The prince stepped toward the doorway, and he could see Phanuel's back, heading for a street lined with stone monuments of laws at either side, some of the columns toppled over.‘Phanuel.’He wanted to say he was sorry.He wanted to tell him that he was wrong.He wanted to tell him he was right.In their youth, Phanuel would insist he was always right, he was wiser and older, even if by a mere year or two.
‘When God punished me after the war, I used to dream of Lucifer dying.One day, I saw my bloodied hands.I killed him.My longing woke Satan, and he burned himself out of Lucifer’s body.’Before the war, however, Lucifer had appeared in Michael’s home, wanting to love the prince in a way that Michael didn’t understand.In perfect clarity now, ‘I remember your frightened eyes, your desperation.There was something terribly wrong that you wanted to tell me.But you didn't.God was in there with us.You said that you loved me.You wanted me to be your God.I didn’t realize you were asking me to save you from Him.’
‘Why?Why?’Michael had thought at God, and he’d merely heard an echo.‘Why?’
In the tower — the devil touched the faces of some demons, examined their wounds, and he sighed into the crowd of them.Many of them held bags of belongings, all that they’d managed to save from Hell’s fires, while others clutched various kinds of weapons.In their wide eyes, Satan saw his own tired face reflected, and he noticed the frightened quivers of their lips.Very juvenile, innocent-seeming.‘Now that the eternal torture we’ve always spoken of is finally before us, you feel the weight of dread.’“The apocalypse hasn’t finished,” Satan told a demon he drifted his touch away from, as well as all the hundred gathered around him, listening.“You demons defeated Heaven, and you saved me from Michael, from the God above, and all the angels.We will never know defeat.No more lives will be lost.”
The words had fallen from his mouth before he could stop them, and he saw Asmodeus’ loathing face in his mind.
A boom sounded in the distance, something akin to thunder, but Satan ignored it until a pair of doors at the other end of the hall opened loud enough to silence all the demons in the room.And Baal in all his armor and horns stepped through quickly, his dark, thin wings folding closer to his back.“Angels.”Immediately, Satan’s hand went to his revolver.“But not God’s.”He hesitated.“The Watchers.”
A second passed, as if Satan was trying to remember what that word meant, and then he turned on his heel, headed for the window.Swiftly, he took the iron deadbolt, pulled it back, then pushed open the pane.Satan set a foot on the sill, then the other.Standing on the window, facing the apocalypse.He saw what had made that boom sound earlier — a falling piece of a star, crashing against a smaller building and the vehicles parked next to it.‘Destroying Babylon.’How much of it had the Watchers already destroyed?Biting down a sting of anger, Satan allowed his hands to curl into fists as he faced the attackers, almost two hundred angels flying forward only to slow, then hover before him, his tower, wings flapping slow.
At the front, bathed in starlight, and with pale warpaint over his face — Azazel.One hand continued to hold a chain that attached to the collar on Samyaza behind him as Azazel met Satan’s stare.The other Watchers swarmed by him were panting, baring their teeth, growling — all like the animals that centuries of torture had turned them into.This was revenge, wasn’t it?The Watchers destroying the world as the demons had done to theirs.
“Azazel,” Satan called, “all of you —” But then his shoulders loosened, and he smiled too wide.“How about we have dinner?”
Armoni, meanwhile, brought Rosier to a cramped chamber in the tower, one of a few reserved for dukes, where Moloch had seemingly settled with some followers.They were gathered by the burly insurgent, and the closest to him was a red-haired demon named Ara, dressed in sheer, much like Armoni — both of them trying to appeal to Moloch’s tastes.Except Ara had done it willingly, though with that empty look in his eyes and bitter curl to his lips that he always carried.‘Cain’s old lover, Ara.’Armoni didn’t get along with him, had long stopped pitying the demon who loyally stood beside Moloch and his barbarity simply because Moloch had been there for him in the aftermath of Cain’s death.But for love, pain is an easy thing to excuse.Armoni had learned that well from his closest friends since he left Heaven.
