Hope's Light
Chapter 11
by Erisian
Book 6
Chapter Eleven - Stand
I spent a few more minutes, there in the now-empty hall. Tsáyidiel remained quiet, allowing me space to think. While the idea of returning to give Krux the grief he so greatly deserved appealed, the entire quest to find the Apostle no longer felt as urgent.
Oh, I still wanted to know if this demon had information that could lead to my other friends, and also wanted to find out just exactly who he was to be saying things in my name. But from what Cassius had just told me, other priorities had become much more important.
And thus decision became action.
Perceptions pierced the elemental earth above to chart out the numerous tunnels back to the surface, and we took flight - with me again shrouding the outward shine as Tsáyidiel had taught. Anyone with truer vision would likely still sense our passage - while my companion was virtually undetectable, my own presence sent ripples through the realm’s fabric much the way space curves in the wake of a massive stellar object.
You know, like that of a burning sun.
Back into the heat under the realm’s sky of fire, we sped between towers, retracing our paths to a place we’d already been.
Except this time the azure-skinned demon outside Greepa’s bar didn’t want to let me in.
“You not Citadel,” he growled while looming over me with an eight foot bodybuilder’s frame. “No entry!” Stepping out, he placed himself firmly in front of the nondescript doorway and crossed arms that would have been envy of the most roided-out gym rats.
Maybe it was because I’d just left a friend stuck in a mire of continuous suffering, or maybe it was the fact that a certain drunkard of a Grigori had earlier lied right to my face, but after thinking things over I was not exactly in a good mood.
Not even close.
Even my chosen outfit had shifted. Gone were the mismatched rags rifled from the intake facility’s lost and found, those having been replaced by a medieval yet modern tactical mix of white, in the forms of an embossed leather cuirass over a silk tunic and matching leggings tucked into ivory twenty-first century military boots. A touch of bright gold-laced crimson was provided by long hair bound as a single center braid draped against a shoulder, and out of not wanting to cause a general outcry by the surrounding denizens, wings had been tucked away.
But Camael’s bracers once again provided sharply dark contrast upon otherwise pale wrists in their full-sized and battle-ready golden-black form.
I didn’t give the demon a chance for any further bluster. With an upraised hand, power reached out to sink below his blue flesh and grip one of the souls the fiend had swallowed. Specifically, a soul residing within the pattern of his throat. Meaty demon fingers instantly floundered against that overly-muscled neck as he choked and stumbled to the ground, struggling to keep that former meal down.
Sickeningly, the soul I had grabbed was as slimy as the essence of the demon it rested inside, full of smoldering hatred and a terrible need for violence - equally burning and shrieking in reaction to the Light.
In many ways that was even worse than feeling the pattern of its host.
Disgusted, I released them both and without a word stepped over the whimpering demon.
A quick scan inside the barely-lit joint showed that little had changed except for one important detail. The devil bartender still wore vest and dress shirt, the floors were freshly mopped, a couple of office-attire demons sat at the bar, but the jerk I wanted to find was missing from his nest of empty bottles and soiled napkins.
Greepa stared while pouring an ale - not unlike a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming Peterbilt.
Oh. I was still glowing. Peachy.
“Your bouncer,” I snapped across the room. “Where is he?”
The bartender took a moment to find his voice, and eventually succeeded. Points to him. “Why…why should I tell you this?”
“He and I have further business.”
“Business?” Greepa licked lips, noting that customers were watching. “What sort of business?” The guy was trying to determine if he should get a cut…or not.
I pushed the issue. “You sure you want to know?” The bar became less dim, and honestly the additional illumination did the dingy decor no favors.
“I…no. I suppose not.” The devil put down the overfilled glass. “He’s off-shift. Typically he takes his sleeps in random corners, but as he’s flush with cash and can afford the bribes - you should try the hydroponics garden. Two floors up.”
I didn’t even nod. I simply turned and walked away.
Out to where a demon on bended knee struggled to regain his lost breath. Except this time the symbol embossed and outlined in gold across the front of my cuirass finally registered within his sight, and in recognized surprise the overly-muscled guy threw himself fully prostrate, forehead shoved firmly against the ground as I walked briskly past.
It was the same mark as upon my palm, only larger:
A four-pointed star.
Nick was found exactly where the bartender had said.
Two floors above the bar, and taking at least three floors more with the space’s height, a hydroponics interior greenhouse lifted rack after rack of well-watered platforms full of vegetables both familiar and not. There were many entrance doors, all locked, but a whispered word gained access and I entered, while Tsáyidiel slid into shadows to stand guard outside.
The dense humidity inside slapped against skin, thick enough that swirls of moisture gathered just below the tall ceiling to rain over plants and walkways all, a light drizzle with occasional heavier drops.
It was with his back propped up against such a water-slogged rack that I found him, drenched from messy beard and wild hair to the damp patchwork-booted toes sprawled straight-legged across the aisle.
Leaking out from under the splayed coat, coarse red swirled into the watery puddle surrounding him.
With the entire area in sleep mode, peaceful quiet was broken only by the low hum from the smaller lights lining the footpaths - and by sporadic buzzing from a distant overhead lamp sparking from a rain-induced short, yielding this haunting impression of lightning dancing far, far away.
His eyelids had closed to those random flashes, and wrapped within crossed arms as if hugging a life preserver sat a thick green bottle - cap in place and interior contents still full.
I stood over him, stood over this unkempt wretch of a being wallowing in misery and overflowing with terrible inner pain. The gash in his side had deepened since last I’d seen him, even though it had only been most of a sleep cycle, as the hooks of agony from his spirit’s suffering clawed tighter at the embedded curse within the wound - tighter than any fisherman’s lost nylon net. His spirit was already frayed due to parts of itself having gone missing, as the feathers of his former sacred connections had been sliced away by a blade of scorching fire long ago.
Another wound which had never properly healed.
My pent-up irritation - the anger, the frustration - all of it washed away standing there in rain which wasn’t rain.
After a pained sigh, I slid to the floor beside him and tilted face into the falling wet, letting warm water trail across cheeks in the place of all the tears I had yet allowed myself to shed.
His breathing eventually revealed when he awoke, and another minute passed in silence filled only by the gentle drops soaking each tray of produce, the meshes underneath plinking excess condensed moisture upon green and purple leaves covering racks below. Together it crafted a sound much like the patter heard below a rainforest’s canopy.
Eventually - albeit softly - my voice interrupted the peace.
“I can see why you like this place.”
A short exhale, and then, “I miss the storms.”
“There’s rain on the Rock. You could go there.”
“Rain and hail with a sun ever-burning below the clouds? That just isn’t right.”
“I suppose not.”
“And electricity is messed up in that realm anyway.”
“I never did understand why the physics there is so weird.”
“Can’t expect subtle consistencies from a place maintained by a hammer.”
“Guess not.”
Drip-filled quiet followed, and then it was his turn to break it.
“I was there, you know. When life was created. On Earth.”
Wanting to give him space to continue, I didn’t say anything.
“The primordial ooze,” he continued after a long minute, “or whatever scientists want to label it, had formed. Water, methane, hydrogen, ammonia, and the other needed bits such as silica, all swirling around in the tides. Beliel summoned the First, along with his perpetual sidekick to be witness and judge from the shores, and I…I flew high above to gather mighty clouds around the globe with the required differentials between ground and sky.”
His fingers found the cap of the bottle. Twisting, the cap came free - but he didn’t drink. Instead he only played with the metal cover, rolling it between fingers and mystically tattooed palm.
“It took awhile,” he eventually added. “Seeding all those sludged pools with zapped potential - not that we cared about the passage of time. We had yet to manifest fully in physical forms, you see. Time’s grasp on spirits is ephemeral, entropy’s touch does not apply.”
When his following silence had dragged on too long, I prompted him again. “And?”
He inhaled slowly. “And under the continual lightning strikes, the created amino acids and compounds finally combined into the shapes Beliel and Uriel had seeded as possibilities into the design. Eventually, for the first time, collated matter self-directed its own movement instead of reacting only to outside impingements. Which is where Azrael’s role came in.”
“How so?”
“Beginnings and endings. The start of such movement implies an end, with entropy breaking things down to be reabsorbed and started again. Life and Death. Over and over.”
“Isn’t that part of the beauty of it? Always changing, always growing.”
“I used to think so.”
We sat there mutely again, both soaked beyond the point where more didn’t matter, until finally I had to probe.
“I need to know what happened.”
“Hmm? I told you: Life and Death.”
“Not that. You being carried by Camael, and both of you hurt.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t make me insist.”
“Would you?”
“Camael took a one-way trip to Hell just to tell me how to leave. I owe him.”
“I came too.”
“You said you were blackmailed. Isaiah filled me in exactly how.”
“Seriously? What a jerk.”
“I’m tired of asking, Nick. Where is Camael?”
“You don’t owe him a damned nickel. Just look at what he did to you. To us! He started all this shit - he stole away your life and manipulated mine!”
“Do you really think he had a choice?”
“That…that raises questions I don’t feel like addressing. Either way, he carries the blame.”
“Who were you fighting? Who could have damaged a warrior such as him?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Fine.” The metal cap crumpled between his thumb and curled forefinger. “I did.”
“You did what?”
“I caused harm to Heaven’s untouchable and legendary Butcher.”
My heart fell. “But…why?”
A harsh snort and the bottle raised to his lips. But instead of drinking, he paused and lowered it. “You really going to tell me that you never wanted to? With all that’s happened?”
Though my mouth dropped open, no words came out. With a disturbing inner shudder, I closed it again.
“Yeah,” he said. “Thought so. Except I actually did it. To save someone. To save a soul.”
Pulling knees up, I huddled on the floor next to the bitter and fallen angel. “Who?”
Amber spilled from the bottle’s open top, dripping across his hand. “Cathy - Catherine.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Of course you don’t.” With a muffled thud, his head leaned back against the rack behind us. “After graduating Whateley, I went to Oxford. Earned a scholarship, the whole nine, from having the deepest potential well of magic ever tested. For once I actually studied; shit I worked my ass off. In the end, though, I did too well.” He paused, staring upward to let rain slip through unkempt hair and streak greasily across face and forehead.
“How so?”
“Those old farts were eager for each instinctive insight I provided. So they showed me books - forbidden works. Let me borrow them even - which is ridiculous when you think about it - so I could read specific passages regarding the higher workings of magic, and the interplay between spirit and manifestation. Which is how I fucked up, as usual.”
“I heard something about your girlfriend. Was that Cathy?”
“Whatever you heard was wrong. And yeah, that was Cathy. I was crazy in love with her, you know? My first girl, my first love. She too studied magic, but she parroted the same crap as those decrepit professors. I tried to explain to her how their official notions missed the mark, but she wouldn’t listen. So I showed her the passages from one of those books - safe paragraphs, abstract concepts - that proved the point. That’s all. Then I locked the stupid thing away in the so-called secure case the bearded morons had provided.” He wiped the wet from his face, then frowned because all he’d done was manage to smear some of the alcoholic amber across nose and cheeks above the beard instead.
“So what happened?”
Using a dubiously laundered sleeve, he tried to clean his face. “She bypassed their wards while I was sleeping. Read the whole cursed thing in one night without any prep.” He sighed. “Lord knows what that did to her mind and spirit. Next thing I knew, she was shaking me awake - wanting me to join her in performing a greater summoning and binding. I told her she was nuts, ripped the book from her greedy little fingers, and kicked her out of my flat.”
“You didn’t tell the professors?”
He winced. “That would have gotten her - and probably me - forced out. They’d made us students sign affirmations that we would each only study materials as approved by faculty - on pain of expulsion. I wanted to reason with her once she’d calmed down. So that afternoon I went to her place after she’d missed classes, but by then it was too late.” He paused again.
It was my turn to wipe moisture away. “Why too late?”
“When knocking at her apartment, I smelled the sulfur. Kicked my way in - but her flat was a small studio unit. To get the circle to fit, she’d needed the entire space. You see, she’d used her phone the night before. She’d taken pictures of the darker rituals, words and diagrams all.”
“Oh no.”
“Punting the door off its hinges launched the wreckage across the lines and broke the bindings. She instantly got pulled in by what she’d contacted, and the bastard laughed at me past each chewed bite as I hastily banished his ass. Only a bloody mess was left behind.”
Putting aside the horror of the scene, I thought through the consequences. “And the administration blamed you.”
“They had to, or else authorities would have nailed them to the wall instead. It was their spell she defeated to get to the book, and they’d violated their own policies in sharing such a dangerous tome with a student in the first place.”
“Which is when you got expelled - and met Soren.”
“Yeah. I was up on negligent homicide charges and he bailed me out of jail. No idea who he bribed or extorted, but the case simply disappeared. Except looking at it now, he obviously knew full well who I really was, and never told me. Sliced off my wings, let my daughter die under the tsunami, and then what…thousands of years later took me as his apprentice? Just for kicks? Hoping I’d come to remember so he could gloat all over again?!”
I stared past my leggings to the thick leather boots. “Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, he took you as his apprentice because he had hope for you?”
“Hope?!”
“He was working to bring his sacred vision to life. Me, as Amariel. The Light he’d seen in his own ascension during the War in Heaven. The vision which granted him the strength to stand toe-to-toe against the Archangel Samael. The promise in the Light he’s been chasing after his entire existence since.”
“What…what are you saying?”
“You once commented that as Soren he’d told you that he was trying to save the world. Weren’t you part of the world he’s been trying to save? He even gave you back your wings, likely in the belief that I’d be able to restore them. And at the same time managed to get Azrael maneuvered into promising to maintain the Fourth Seal to keep everyone else - all the other Grigori and Nephelim - safe as well.” I shook my head. “Camael didn’t really need you to find me. He traced my location through his bracers; you just made the trip easier with your knowledge of the players and realms’ geography. But even he couldn’t have foreseen the fight with Azazel and Beliel’s Mace, ending with my being pulled into the Chaos so quickly after having been found.”
A fist tightened around the bottle. “He blackmailed-”
“No,” I interrupted. “He manipulated. Out of fanatical hope - not for me, but for you. Think about it. Think about everything he planned and executed. How much care and patience it must have taken, to leave so little to chance. He wanted you to be there when I returned as Amariel in that storage locker. He wanted us together, wanted to finally lift you back into the Light.”
Thick tears of frustration blended with the rain. “Then I truly fucked up. Then as now. Just like always.”
“Tell me.”
With a strangled sniff, a sleeve again wiped his nose. “The demon that swallowed Cathy, after discovering who I really was, traded her up the demonic food chain. To a Duke directly sworn to Asmodeus’ service. I had to bargain with Asmodeus himself to free her soul, don’t you see? He’s too powerful for me to defeat, he was a freaking archangel - he’s one of the Sarim!”
“What could you have possibly bargained with?” Saying it, the answer popped into clarity, and I gasped in horror even as Nick confirmed it.
“Camael. I promised him a wing off Camael’s back.”
“Oh my God. But how?”
He pointed to the bracers upon my wrists. “His protection is missing those. With Asmodeus’ help, the weakness was exploited.”
Anger - nay, fury - boiled. “Then why was he carrying your wounded ass out of the pipes?!”
The Grigori turned his head away. “To save me. From what Cathy did once freed.” He put a hand to the gash under his coat, and it squished raw underneath.
I gaped. “It was her that stabbed you?! After you…” I blinked, rage colliding headlong into befuddlement, and thereby dispelling the tongue’s capacity for coherence.
“After she was declared free. Because she blames me for all of it. The summoning book and for not working with her on the ritual. And then breaking the circle. Her soul - it’s been twisted by that cursed tome and Hell. Or it always was this way, and a naive love-blind sophomore never saw it.”
I couldn’t sit anymore. Forcing myself back onto feet, I stared down at the hunched-over wretch refusing to meet my eyes. “So where is Camael now? He carried you out, then what?!”
“I passed out as he picked me up. Really, I don’t know - I woke up atop a pile of corpses. He was gone.”
“Then you’re going to help me find him. Just like you helped him find me.”
He patted his side, wincing from the touch. “I’m in no shape to-”
“Get up.”
“What?”
“Stand the fuck up, Nicolas Wright! Or Barakiel, or whatever the heck you want to be called. Get up! Now!!”
Blinking with shock, he actually did as told, putting aside the bottle first and then needing to lean against the rack to stay steady on battered leather barely qualifying as shoes.
A bonfire churned within my chest, fierce flames licking at the lungs. “Apparently this is a day for painful procedures. Think of it as atonement’s initiation.”
“What are you-”
He didn’t have the chance to finish the question. Wings flashed as I shoved a hand into his side, the fresh flood of power acting as a fiery scalpel to slice at his spirit along the boundary where the cursed blade’s hateful corruption inched towards the broken angelic core. White fire flowed pure to scorch along the lines where his own spirit had hooked guilt, sorrow, and anger to encourage the deadly suicidal progression.
Unlike Yomyael, he didn’t scream. Or even whimper.
He merely shut both eyes and let me do it, though I did have to wrap an arm behind his waist to keep him upright. The surgery wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t neat. Nor did I try to fill the empty hollow at his center with any promises.
Yet when staring into its deepest recesses, a tiny flick of lightning still burned within.
New chapters posted every Monday and Friday! Thanks for reading...and for commenting!
- Erisian
