In contrast, Baal stared adoringly, compelled to approach and kiss his god.‘Sweet Satan.’The one he’d fallen from paradise for.‘There you are.’
Far away, the prince Uriel startled.Where had he, Uriel, been all this time?Well, the same place he’d been during the war for Heaven and during the flood — a library.This time, however, it was in ruins and in a language he didn’t know well.A few humans had come in and out since he’d made refuge here, but they didn’t bother him, except to ask for reassurances that Uriel was ill-equipped to give.And he’d been too busy, concerned with trying to decipher as many texts as he could before the world ended.Really, it was the first time he’d delved so deeply into humanity’s thoughts.Some were interesting; ‘I’ll only give them that.’But he found himself lingering on a few romance novels, then some old folk tale collections.
Staring at the illustration of a princess and her beloved, he’d felt his heart turn.‘Dina had loved these more than anything.’And he’d never bothered to ask why, to really understand.‘But I understand it now, Dina.I do.’His face had warmed at the poetry.‘If I’d let myself listen to you, or let myself feel anything for you, maybe none of this would have happened.And maybe I would have earlier realized what is so obvious now: I haven’t loved.For billions of years, I haven’t loved.I only thought that I did.Kimah must have known this, too.One day, I had grown to love grieving him, rather than loving him.’
Uriel knew now that he deserved all of Kimah’s resentment, and he knew he deserved Dina’s rage.
But when he heard a rumble outside, and screams, Uriel looked across the quiet library with shelves toppled to the ground, flooding the tiles with pages.Over the heads of huddled humans, he saw a window.And he breathed out shakily.‘Kimah,’ Uriel thought, then he hurried to cross the building, toward the exit — every human scattering out of his way.Uriel peered out to examine what he’d seen through the glass.Some streets down, a figure of fire loomed over the buildings.At his head, a star like a halo.The same star that had called itself Kimah before Uriel abandoned the war.However, lifting his gaze even higher, Uriel noticed a swarm.Angels, but not armored.The Watchers, hesitating among the clouds.
And in that same tendon of the sky, Kokabiel stopped suddenly, all the Watchers above, not quite to the empty void of space above.‘Kimah,’ he thought too.Craning his neck back, a thousand voices suddenly rushed at Kokabiel, but they all said the same thing.‘Kimah.’He whispered, “Wait,” and when no one heard him, he had to shout, “All of you!” It was so urgent, coherent, that it almost didn’t sound like Kokabiel quite at all.The lucidity turned Baraqiel’s head first, of course, and it was only through seeing him that Kokabiel was able to grit out —“The stars— Wait?—”
Holding Samyaza’s hand, Azazel stopped as well, turned his head, fluttered his wings to remain in place.“You told us that the stars made room for us, and the Earth is a wasteland.”He nodded his head at Rosier, on Danel’s back, and Armoni, fluttering clipped wings and latching onto Samyaza.“We shouldn’t put ourselves in the Leviathan’s way.”
“Then don’t,” Kokabiel suddenly giggled, “but I think I will.”
Meanwhile, Dina was staring up at the beast of Lucifer, eyes wide, breath harshly coming in and out of his mouth.He stepped back just as Apsinthos hissed, ‘Kimah has given his body to Satan—’ Then, Apsinthos addressed him: ‘Kimah!It’s too late to intervene with the end times.’
‘It’s not my body,’ Kimah replied.‘I’m split among trillions of stars.Like you, Apsinthos.I have no single body left.All I’ve given him is fire.’And from fire, came flesh.
For Satan: it was liberation.Liberation — at last — from a body.How long had it been since the devil had felt this?Lifetimes.His eyes saw God, though he’d refused to see Him at the Throne.He saw Him now, better than he ever had.And when he saw Him, a slow, churning wrath began to build within.Satan grunted, and when he turned to Apsinthos, the anger only swelled until all the fire that composed him scorched his vision.But the screech of the Leviathan was near.The end was near.
Michael only watched, then reached to touch Lupina’s arm, trying to urge her to take a step back, silently asking her to take Joana’s body somewhere, too.‘Everything is going to end now.’Joana’s love should spend her last seconds not knowing that, in a safer place, away from this.Lupina nodded, then went to wheel Tadeo's mother away with them, and Michael shakily stood.His armor might protect him from the flames, but his sword would be useless against it, against him, Satan.‘How to kill a star?’Michael wondered.
“I know,” Kokabiel whispered now to Baraqiel, “how to kill a star.”In response, Baraqiel furrowed his brow, almost in irritation, and the angel of the star’s mouth twitched.‘You are never going to forgive me?’he thought.‘You are never going to forgive me.’All he’d done was force Baraqiel to sleep with a woman; all he’d done was sleep with several humans right in front of him.“Aha,” he laughed breathlessly.“I still love you,” he said plainly, “Bara.”‘The last thing I’ll love,’ he promised.‘First thing I loved.’“Don’t stop me,” Kokabiel said next, and the fallen angel of light tilted his head.“I know it’s against your nature, but you must let me burn out.”
Dina stumbled backward, heart a hammer against his ribs, then told Apsinthos, ‘We’re done here, aren’t we?We need to leave.They want to destroy you.I love you.I don’t want you to be hurt.’
‘This is just one body of many,’ Apsinthos reassured, ‘though one of the few I have complete control over.Even if they destroy me, it will change nothing.’Even still, the star obeyed, creeping backward and higher.
Satan had just lowered himself onto the ground, on his hands and feet like an animal.Then, his crawl began fast; he plunged through everything on the road — the toppled vehicles, the debris.Closer and closer, he sped toward Apsinthos, but before he could reach him, the Leviathan’s shrieks sounded again.Turning his head, eyes wide and burning like dual suns, Satan caught the sea serpent just as it bulleted in his direction from its hiding place behind houses on another street.It threw itself against the devil, and together, they crashed into a building and an abandoned tank.Satan raised a blazing arm, scratched it against the head of the Leviathan, and his mouth went ajar with light and a shout of fury.
Unlike Satan’s body, a sword, Michael knew, could cut through the sea monster.But, again, he didn’t move.Even after Lupina had made it elsewhere, the weight of Joana’s corpse lingered.‘I did this for you.’But she was dead.And God had said it would all be over after the apocalypse; Michael would be dead, free from every painful second of living.He could see, from the corner of his eye, angels.But all of the world was muffled.He was hearing Joana still.His legs were rooted to the Earth she loved so much, that she would have rejected Heaven a thousand times for.
On the contrary, Baal shouted for the demons to raise their weapons.“Kill the Leviathan!”he barked, hurrying back to get on his horse, to lead it away from so close to the battle, swerving it just in time before the Leviathan crushed the road where he’d been standing.Baal pulled on the reins, bringing the winged stallion up into the air, and as soon as he was approaching the height of the Leviathan’s head, he lifted a shotgun that’d been attached to the horse’s armor with a single hand, pressed on the trigger.The bullet passed straight through, and then so did the next, and the one after that.The legion of demons all followed, and a rush of gunshots chased the sea monster.
Uriel, meanwhile, landed stealthily in a crouch on top of a building nearby.“Kimah—?”His heart thudded hard in his chest at what wasnotKimah, what was Satan in every feature of his face; and yet, he felt something there, a sensation like it was his own body standing on that road and fighting the Leviathan.“Kimah…?”Then, Uriel noticed Dina, who was retreating the same as Apsinthos and ducking his head to avoid any stray bullets.His mouth opened, closed, opened: he was yelling at Apsinthos to leave with him somewhere safer.But then, the archangel heard even more noise, raised his head, saw a few more angels descending, hovering.Watchers.
Satan was still screaming in all his fury, pummeling the Leviathan who coiled itself around his limbs, even with bullets tearing hundreds of small, dot-wounds to bleed from.It screeched in the face of Satan, matching his yells, refusing to surrender.When a red-haired angel fell from the sky, the devil didn’t notice.It wasn’t until he heard the smash of something colliding with a hovering star nearby that he turned his golden face.Body flared, howls halting for a second.
After the plunge, Kokabiel had felt a second of peace, and then, as he sunk into the star — an unbearable scorch.His mouth opened in pain, and yet, he couldn’t scream, the fire bursting his lungs first, then his throat.‘This is the pain you’ve told me of.’All the stars.For all other things, the stars never agreed, whispered to Kokabiel conflicting truths, expressed their different dreams — but they shared the same pains.Long ago, he’d learned to recognize some voices; he knew them from their wordplay, the desires they expressed the most.To silence all the other voices, to hear only one, to know everything, to have the truth for the first time — he did this.Spreading thin, picked apart by the flames.‘Kokabiel.’Was that his voice or another’s?‘Kokabiel.’His thoughts, like his flesh, were pulling, stretched out into time, far into the dim vacuum above.
‘Baraqiel,’ he’d always called to him in Heaven after the war, ‘the stars told me—’ He wanted to tell him what he saw now, wanted him to know all the truth.How to kill a star.How to kill God.Kokabiel drowned in it — the truth.
Above, Baraqiel jolted, and though Danel grabbed at his arm, he stopped himself on his own.Azazel asked what was happening, his heart stuttering and caving in, but Baraqiel said nothing.The blaze was beautiful, all the fire more magnificent than God, in that moment.‘Koka.’How stupid he’d been.‘You burn as bright as I always felt you did.’He grimaced deep and a choke fell from his mouth.‘I loved you because you were dangerous, because you were like fire, but I ran from you when it started to burn.’The star they all witnessed grew brighter, as if Kokabiel had turned into its fuel before, suddenly, it swerved one way, then the other.Briefly, Baraqiel thought he saw Kokabiel’s face, his eyes, in the mass of fire-flesh that composed the star before it lurched toward Apsinthos with a thousand mouths opening, closing around the blaze of the most wicked sun.
Dina screamed at this, barely managing to beat his wings to throw himself far from the stars.As he did, he stumbled onto a wall, not far from Michael.He watched, heard, Apsinthos roar and struggle against the star Kokabiel had managed to manipulate, but as he was bit into, chunks of his body tore off, flares whipping out like wings from them both.Frantic, horrified, Dina turned to Michael, called, “What are you doing?!Aren’t you supposed to bring about the apocalypse?For good!For the greater good!”Tears gathering, starting to stumble down his face, the young angel pleaded: “End this, Michael!End it, please!”But the chief prince’s eyes were dark, cruel on him.And Dina shuddered.‘Maybe Tadeo was right.The world ended a long time ago, and it’s this place that is Hell.’
Apsinthos’ sight began to slip, all the suicidal intent that he’d had came to a grinding halt.Ferociously, he fought back; he resisted the growing darkness, the sudden drowsiness, and Apsinthos forced himself to grow brighter, to bite back.As he did, the star of Kokabiel shuddered, began to dim itself and shrivel.
Satan, in the hold of the Leviathan, watched: the darkening, weakened star backing away, close to the ground.Kokabiel, almost certainly dead now.But Apsinthos was also noticeably less bright and smaller, his spherical body now misshapen.With renewed vigor, Satan tore the Leviathan off of him, just enough for him to immediately crawl over the ground in a burning, terrifying panic, vision narrowing to tunnel around Apsinthos.He had to crush him, in his hands; he had toeathim.He had to do it now.
Nearby, Baal cursed, trying to reload as fast as he could to help his fellow demons prevent the Leviathan from reaching Satan.As he worked, he saw Michael, ‘stupid fucking Michael,’ with Dina by his side.And, breath catching, clenching his teeth in anger, he turned the gun.Knowing that Michael’s armor would protect him — Baal opted for Dina.
Jolting, Michael heard the boom, then looked over to see the young angel thrown back, crash against a wall.The bullet had gone through his mouth, tearing little of his lips but decimating his teeth, the base of his skull.Instinctively, Michael tried to reach for him, but then he stopped, and oddly, he remembered where he was, what was happening.He looked at who’d done it as Dina jerked, clutching at a throat now covered in blood.‘Baal.’
Dina, shaking, eyes wide, choked up, though he could still breathe — angels could not die, angels could not die, though Dina had just seen one burn up.‘Why won’t the world end?’What had he done wrong?Why wasn’t God satisfied?Why couldn’t He put them out of this suffering?A mercy kill?Wasn’t God merciful?Warily, he looked up at the one who’d made him do all of this.
But the devil didn’t reach Apsinthos in time.The Leviathan wrapped itself around Satan and, in a final effort, flung its own body with Satan’s into the crack in the Earth.Nails and fingers of flames clawed at the Earth as Satan was pulled toward Hell.
