“Corrupted harlot!” spat Orion.
Nyx’s hand came up, her finger extended and the gold talon pointed directly at Orion, though she had not turned from Caelum. “If you don’t take your hand off your sword right now, I swear your existence will come to an end.”
Caelum’s eyes went to Orion. Nyx didn’t bother to turn around, knowing that Orion was doing exactly what she’d told him. She waited a moment longer, then said, “Good dog.”
She could practically feel Orion’s anger and resentment welling up behind her. It made her smile.
“I don’t think I want to leave this world,” she said. “Someone needs to be here to corrupt mankind.”
“They are corrupt enough,” said Caelum. “They need guidance. They need embrace the proper ways. And your presence here will make it difficult.”
“Did His son want me gone?” asked Nyx. “Did Tribunal ask that I be removed?”
“It is not His decision,” said Caelum. “It is…. ”
“But it was supposed to be His decision,” said Nyx. “He came, He saw, He suffered, and He was to make the decision and God was to abide by it. So I’ll ask again. What did Tribunal want?”
“That is not His name in these realms,” snapped Orion.
“I don’t care what His name is in these realms.”
“You must leave,” said Caelum. “God has said there will be three Angels on this world and no more for the next thousand years. So leave this place.”
“And who,” asked Nyx, “is going to make me?” She could practically hear Orion’s hand creeping towards his sword again. Her smile changed, transforming into the grin of a wolf that has scented blood. “God is gone, remember? And without His power behind you, do you really think you can beat me?”
Caelum straightened, his chest puffing out. “I am an Angel of God!”
“So am I,” said Nyx. “So what?”
“I have His blessing and serve in His army!”
“I decimated half His army,” said Nyx. “I fought Michael to a standstill. I am the Queen of Hell and I got that way by destroying all those who stood in my way. So I ask you again, what did Tribunal want?”
“Tribunal wanted what His Father wanted,” said Orion. “He is ready to obey His Father.”
“Really?” said Nyx. “Because that wasn’t what He said when we were fucking.”
She was already spinning before Orion’s sword left its scabbard. She closed the distance between them, not bothering to draw her own blade. She caught his arm with one hand, and slashed open his forehead with the talons on the other. Even as he reared back in pain she was already spinning, sending him flying to where Caelum had been standing.
Unlike Orion, Caelum had a decent battle sense. He was already in the air, his sword out, as Orion spun and fell where he had stood.
“You’ve made your choice,” said Caelum. “And since you will not leave, you will have to be destroyed.”
Nyx grinned widely. “I was hoping you would say that.”
Her fiery wings spread open with a whoosh, and she flashed upward in a shimmering cascade of sparks, the force of her launch sending dirt and dust into the air. Her black-bladed sword flamed into life and met Caelum’s. The force of the blow sent both flying back. Caelum charged forward again, his sword flashing.
He isn’t bad, thought Nyx as she parried his charge, bending her wings and using the shift in shape to flip above him. Not good, but not bad.
Orion had recovered his feet and forced himself up into the air. His golden blood was dripping down his forehead where she had opened him up. Nyx pulled her whip free and circled, letting Caelum chase her while Orion came closer.
“I will kill you!” Orion screamed. “I will send you back to your Hell!”
The gilded blood dripped into Orion’s eyes, and in the moment he blinked, Nyx struck. Her whip lashed out, the fire-tipped lashes wrapping around one of his wings. With a hard yank, she took his balance and sent him spinning to the ground, hard. The earth shivered with the impact. In the same motion, she reversed her direction and flew, her sword hacking down at Caelum. He parried the first blow, and the second, but the third was a feint, and when he over-reached the parry, Nyx was ready, driving her blade hard at his stomach.
The armor should have stopped her. It was Angelic armor, the same as Nyx’s, though of a different style. Her blade, despite its power, should have glanced off. But Nyx was no longer a mere Angel. She was not even just the Queen of Hell.
Nyx had lain with God’s son, and even though He had been in His mortal form, with every act of copulation some of His power had passed into her, filling her until her strength had grown far beyond what it had been before.
And so her blade, instead of glancing off, drove through Caelum’s armor, up into his belly, and out his back. He screamed in sudden agony. Nyx spun in the air again, Caelum’s impaled body with her, and flung him down on top of Orion.
Orion tried to catch Caelum, and the force of his fall drove them both into the earth. Nyx’s whip wrapped around Orion’s sword hand and ripped the blade out of it, tearing open his flesh along the way. He shoved Caelum off and tried to get his feet, but Nyx was already there, dropping on him with all her weight and driving both her spiked heels into his chest. He cried out, and Nyx sat on him, her blade at his throat.
“You must be a great disappointment to God,” she said. “You didn’t even manage one swing of your blade. Didn’t even manage to get into the fight. But then, you were never much of a fighter, were you? More of a watcher.” One of Nyx’s hands came up and gently stroked Orion’s hair. “Such a pretty watcher, but still just a watcher. Not a worthy opponent, or lover, or even a worthy friend to poor Caelum. Just a watcher.”
Moving so fast that it was a blur, Nyx’s hand shot up and drove down, two taloned fingers extended like spikes. Orion screamed as the talons pierced his eyes, sending golden blood and clear fluid fountaining from the sockets…
“Poor watcher,” said Nyx, standing and ripping her heels from his chest, leaving two gaping, sucking wounds. “Now you won’t be able to see what I’m going to do with Caelum.”
Orion rolled onto his stomach, his wings attempting to flap.
Nyx swung her sword four times. The first two severed Orion’s wings; the next two took one leg and one arm, leaving him screaming in the dirt, his severed limbs still twitching beside him. Nyx turned back to Caelum. “And now for you, my pure, virtuous Angel.”
Caelum was trying to push himself upright with one hand, the other attempting to staunch the luminous blood flowing from his stomach. Nyx pushed him over backwards with her boot, dropped her knees to either side of his head, and sat down on his face.
Caelum struggled hard, trying to dislodge her. Nyx ground her crotch hard against his face, enjoying the pleasure it brought. She watched Orion rolling about, screaming and trying to feel his way free.
“Tell you what, Caelum,” she said, sliding her body down against his until their crotches were rubbing together. “I’ll give you a chance.” She sat up astride Caelum, her hips still moving back and forth, and called to Orion. “Your friend Caelum is quite the beast. Even dying, there’s more to him than there ever was of you.”
Orion’s wordless scream of rage made Nyx laugh. She leaned close to Caelum. “Tell me about the son of God,” she whispered. “What did He really want?”
“To… ” Caelum struggled for enough breath to speak. “To destroy them all. To cleanse the earth of their taint.”
“And God chose to abandon them instead,” said Nyx. “Though He didn’t really abandon them, did he? He left them you two.” She raised her blade. “Earth is mine to walk on, Caelum. It has always been mine, and I will not give it up for the likes of you.” She looked over to Orion. “I’m killing him now, Orion! But not,” she ground her hips harder against Caelum’s body, and every word she spoke was punctuated with a moan, “Until… .I… .take… .my… .pleasure! Yes, Caelum! Yes!”
She arched hersel
f back, pretending ecstasy.
To his credit, Caelum attempted to kill her.
His sword-arm, so weak as to be useless, swung up, the blade aiming for Nyx’s throat. She blocked it easily with her own blade. “Oh, Caelum. Noble until the end.”
Her sword smashed down into his chest, rupturing his heart. His body exploded into gold dust, a lustrous cloud that filled the air around her. Nyx breathed it deeply, knowing it was his essence made manifest. She took into herself his very being, and the euphoria it gave her was stunning, a dizzying surge of light and heat that filled her to her core.
She rose, and slowly walked over to where Orion struggled. “Caelum got to die nobly,” she said, conversationally. “A blow of the sword to the chest. Heart and Caelum all exploding at once into nothingness.” She leaned close and whispered in Orion’s ear. “You aren’t worthy of such a death.“
She knelt on his back, grabbed his hair and pulled it back with one hand. She flicked the whip, wrapping it twice around his neck. On the second one, she let go of his hair and grabbed the end, pulling it tight. She leaned back, and Orion’s bloody, wrecked body reared back at an impossible angle. His remaining hand scrabbled desperately at the steel-hard lash digging into his neck.
Shifting, Nyx drove her diamond heels into his back, pushing off them as she pulled harder and harder. He was an Angel. He did not need breath, and she did not intend to strangle him. Instead, she pulled the whip ends tighter, watching it cut into his flesh. Golden blood spurted from his neck. Still he flailed, and still Nyx pulled the whip tighter.
His head, when it came off, shot away from his body, and sailed briefly through the air before it, and all the parts of his body, exploded into gold dust. Nyx breathed him in as she had Caelum, and rose to her feet.
Tribunal said I should use the word when I am alone, she thought. God was gone, and there was no other angelic presence on the earth, now. This is as alone as I will probably get.
She had no idea how long it would last, though. Caelum said three Angels could walk the earth, now, which meant she had to act fast before they sent another two down.
Taking a deep breath, she spoke the word.
The tongue of Angels is not the tongue of God. His language was the language of Creation. The words in it were not just symbols. Each of the words in the language of Creation was a true name, and held in it the essence of the thing named. Using one of the words, one could call things into existence.
Or bring them to you from another plane.
The word flowed from Nyx’s lips, and reverberated through reality. It was masculine and feminine at once, and when she spoke it her voice became something she had never heard before. The ground, the air, the earthly realm itself, trembled as the force of the word rippled through the world like waves after a tsunami. A penetrating disquiet swept across the earth, a deep disturbance felt at once by all living things. Creatures paused what they were doing, and sleeping people dreamed of fear, though they didn’t know why. Those awake prayed or hid, as though cowering would spare them.
It’s his Name, Nyx realized. Tribunal’s true Name.
The world kept vibrating, and with each syllable a golden sigil slipped from her mouth like smoke from a pipe, gleaming against the night sky. Four sigils for four syllables. Their shine was bright enough to turn the darkness to daylight. She instinctively squeezed her eyes shut, but even so, their light penetrated the thin skin of her eyelids and singed her pupils. The sigils coiled around her body, just as she’d coiled around the cross in cobra form.
Time stopped. And then Tribunal’s voice came to her as clear as if He was still standing beside her.
“Have you done it, my beloved?” Tribunal asked.
“Done what?” said Nyx, even as she basked in the sound of his voice. “Killed God’s Angels? Yes. Spoken the word? Yes. Is there more you wish of me?”
“Much, much more,” said Tribunal. “God lied to me. He did not listen to my judgment, but chose to pass His own. He let these humans live!” The venom in Tribunal’s voice filled in her head, and for a moment her vision swam with the force of it. “He betrayed me! He sent me down to be tortured and killed, and then, when He was finished with me, He would not even listen to me!”
Tribunal’s voice was anguished, and while she understood His pain, it was all Nyx could do not to say, “You were only scourged and crucified.” She’d been hurled from Heaven into the Lake of Fire. Memories of that and the thousand years of pain that followed it filled her mind. A moment later ,they were all overwhelmed by her love for Tribunal. What He wanted, she wanted. “What will You do, then?”
“Not just I,” said Tribunal. “We. We will take these humans He has saved and abandoned, and turn them against Him. And when our followers outnumber His, we will set them against each other, and they will fight until there is none left alive.”
“Why wait?” asked Nyx. “There’s so few of them. I can kill them all tonight and be done with it.”
“No, you can’t,” said Tribunal. “Angels cannot interfere anymore. Not directly.”
“What do you mean?” Nyx was thoroughly confused. “I have been interfering. I just spent three days torturing Judas. Before that, I rewrote Mary’s memory.”
“Judas is no longer of concern. He played his part, and when it was done he was discarded.”
“And Mary?”
“Did rewriting Mary’s memory weaken Christianity?”
“Well….” Nyx thought about it. “No. Shit.” Nyx stewed for a time. “So let me get this straight. God is not allowing any interference with the development of His new little religion.”
“No divine interference,” said Tribunal. “The humans may do as they wish.”
“Then why were His Angels here?”
“To observe,” said Tribunal. “To report back to God at the end of a thousand years and tell Him what the mortals have done.”
“And then what? God judges them again?”
“No.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
“He has said that this time, Mankind will pursue its own course,” said Tribunal. “And they will be judged each as individuals, not as a race, based on their own choices, not the choices made for them by Angels and false Gods.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, and FUCK!” screamed Nyx. She kicked a rock, hard enough to shatter it, then another one, and then a third. “This is horseshit! I can’t do anything? I just get to sit here and…. ”
Nyx stopped. Then she sat down. This is stupid, Nyx decided. I am the Queen of Hell and I’ll be fucked by Lucifer’s pet Incubus before I give up. For a long time she brooded, glaring at the desert rocks as if their very nature was an affront to her.
Then she stood up again. “What, exactly, did God decree?”
Tribunal was silent a moment, and when He spoke His tones echoed God’s exactly. “They shall go unfettered by Angels. They shall have free will and free choice, and they will choose for themselves which actions to take. No Angel shall order, compel, or lay hands on those who build my church.”
Nyx thought about this for a time, then smiled wide. “Right. I will build myself a church, as you asked, and it will rival Christianity very easily, because I am going to wipe Christianity out!”
“You cannot,” Tribunal reminded her. “You cannot interfere with the growth of His church.”
“No,” corrected Nyx. “I cannot order, compel, or lay hands on those who build His church. He didn’t say anything about anyone else.” She grinned. “The Devil is in the details, Tribunal. I will destroy His Christians, as surely as He stole Paradise from me.”
“You are my sword,” He said, and love and warmth poured through the words. “You are my weapon on Earth, and with your power we will turn His flock away from Him. Use your strength, use your guile, use your knowledge of human foibles to break their bond with God and to weaken His hold on this world.
“And when none of His followers remain, when there is no one from here to go to Heaven, then Eart
h shall fall to Hell, and I shall return, and you and I will set up a Paradise and rule it as King and Queen.”
“How?” asked Nyx, glowing from the warmth in his words. “How will we create this Paradise?”
“I will create the Paradise,” said Tribunal. “For it is my power that will make it come into being, and my strength that will hold it for all eternity. But I cannot do it without your help. I cannot create a Paradise on this Earth until God no longer has interest in it. When all His mortal children turn their back on Him, when no more of them come to His realm, only then will He give up on this world, and only then will I be able to recreate it in our image.”
“What about Hell?” asked Nyx, remembering Lucifer, who was no doubt already scheming, now that she was gone. “Whose will that be?”
“Yours, of course,” said Tribunal. “No one would dare take it from you. You will be ruler in Hell still, and share rule in Paradise, and God will be forever gone from this place, and we forever gone from Him. The one who threw you from His paradise will have no sway over ours.”
The thought of being out from under God’s rule sparked a fire inside Nyx. She had been so long from Paradise, and though she claimed no need of it, still part of her wished to be there. To bask in the light of Paradise and to once more feel peace. To laugh with the other Angels, to kiss and frolic: not good, not evil, not innocent, not guilty.
It had been a long, happy childhood.
Then she had asked why God made all the decisions, why the Angels could not be trusted to decide their fates for themselves. She could no longer remember when the idea first occurred to her, or why. But it was the idea that sparked a war in Heaven and sent her to Hell.
Though God still let us roam the earth. Nyx had always wondered at that. It made no sense to deny them Heaven only to give them access to Earth. Maybe that’s part of His punishment, she thought. To let us be part of His lower creations but not the higher ones.
It wasn’t fair. She was an Angel. And now, she was beloved of God’s son.
“Be my sword,” said Tribunal. “Let this be the day of your unsheathing, and let you reap a crop of death and destruction that will tear down the followers of God, and build in their place a temple to Nyx and Tribunal. And when all is done, when the followers of God have fallen away, then will you be sheathed again, and take your place by my side. Ruler of Paradise, ruler of Earth, ruler of Hell.