Standing upon the struggling Cherubim’s chest, he allowed the divine fires of Heaven to flow through his hands and into the wooden shaft that he held. The wood glowed suddenly with an unearthly light, suddenly so much more than it had been.
He raised the new weapon high, preparing to bring it down like a spear. Zophiel, though badly injured, still had much fight remaining in him, flailing his muscular wings and tossing Remy up against the opposing wall.
Zophiel rolled onto his side, using the gigantic blade to help him rise.
Remy leapt into the air as Zophiel lunged, swinging the burning blade. The sword buried itself deep within the plaster wall. Zophiel tugged upon his weapon to free it as Remy dropped down upon him.
Riding the Cherubim’s back, Remy wedged the shaft of the glowing coatrack beneath Zophiel’s chin. He yanked backward with all his strength, causing the monstrous angel to stagger backward, leaving the burning sword stuck within the wall.
Zophiel flailed, slamming his enormous bulk against the hallway walls, desperate to remove the troublesome Seraphim pest.
Remy held on as tightly as he could, pulling up on the burning coatrack beneath the Cherubim’s throat with all his might until the muscles in his arms were screaming. His own hands now burning with Heavenly fire, Zophiel attempted to reach behind him, to grab enough of Remy to tear him from his perch. Avoiding the Cherubim’s wanting fingers, Remy continued to hold on.
At last the great angel dropped to the floor, but Remy did not let up, continuing to pull upon the heavy wooden rod.
From the corner of his eye he saw movement, and Remy turned his head to see Jon over by the stairway wall, where the Cherubim’s sword was still buried. The man was pulling up on the hilt of the giant blade, attempting to free it.
“Leave it,” Remy yelled to the man.
Zophiel saw Jon and what he was doing and became roused by the sight. A low growl from the angel’s constricted throat vibrated the burning shaft still clutched beneath the Cherubim’s chin as Zophiel pushed himself to his feet.
Jon pulled upon the blade, the wall surrounding the weapon beginning to smolder and burn.
With a newfound strength Zophiel reached up with his clawed metal fingers and began to tear at the shaft wedged under his chin, ripping away chunks of wood, as well as his own flesh.
Zophiel lurched across the brief expanse of floor toward the man who sought to claim his weapon. Jon saw the angel coming, increasing his attempts, but still the sword remained trapped in the wall.
Yanking back with all that remained of his strength, Remy heard the fateful snap of the makeshift weapon falling away from the Cherubim onto the floor.
Heavenly fire no longer burning at his throat, Zophiel grabbed for his sword, just as Jon managed the incredible feat of pulling it free.
The sword of the Cherubim dropped heavily to the hallway as Jon attempted to lift it. The strain of this action apparent, the Son of Adam brandished the Heavenly weapon with a surprising display of strength.
“Come on,” Jon said, fighting to keep the blade up.
He thrust the burning sword at Zophiel, the angel easily moving aside to avoid any harm. Lashing out, he struck the Son of Adam, knocking him ruthlessly to the stairs, the flaming weapon falling from his grasp.
As the Cherubim reached to reclaim the blade, Remy reacted.
The Seraphim was crying out for blood, and Remy saw no reason to deny it its fill. Holding two jagged ends of the broken coatrack that still smoldered with the divine fires of the Heavenly Father, Remy leapt, pushing off with his wings, propelling himself at his foe with great speed.
Sensing the imminent danger, Zophiel spun to meet his attack, but the Seraphim was faster. With a bloodthirsty roar, Remy thrust the two jagged ends of the poles into the already ravaged throat of the monstrous Cherubim.
The pair flew back, crashing into the wall just before the stairs, narrowly avoiding Jon, who darted partway up to the second floor to avoid being crushed.
The Cherubim struggled, gauntleted hands going to his injured throat, but Remy did not let up, leaning forward with all his strength, hands still gripping the two ends of the twin spears that had pierced his enemy’s neck. Zophiel’s hands glowed with the fire of the divine, but they began to subside, as did the bestial angel’s struggles.
Remy could feel the angel growing slack, the extensive injuries already received coupled with this latest abuse at last taking their toll. The Cherubim went limp, his powerful, armored body becoming still. Sensing that his foe was down, Remy released his grip upon the two pieces of pole and stepped back. Zophiel stood for a moment, swaying from side to side, before lowering gradually to his knees, and then falling face-first to the floor.
Remy stared at his fallen foe, but strangely enough, even as the warrior nature at his core howled in victory, he felt nothing but trepidation.
“Is it dead?” Jon asked, venturing down from safety.
“If not, I’m sure he soon will be,” Remy said, his voice sounding tired . . . flat. There were missing pieces to this puzzle, and he hated missing pieces.
The Seraphim was eager to finish what he started. . . . Remy, not so much.
He could hear Zophiel’s struggles to live, multiple, wheezing gasps as the angel sentry fought to breathe.
Remy approached his fallen foe, considering the merciful thing. If the Cherubim did not pass from this existence shortly, Remy would assist him on his way. Moving closer, Remy allowed the power of Heaven to fill his hands. Fire hotter than the surface of the sun snaked from his fingertips as he grew nearer.
Jon watched from his perch upon the stairs, crying out as Zophiel again fought off approaching death, reaching out to grab hold of his fallen weapon, dragging the burning blade to him.
Remy drew back, preparing for yet another round of battle, but quickly sensed that maybe this was not the case.
The Cherubim pulled the sword close, using the blade to prop himself up.
The two pieces of wood still protruded from his throat, dark blood oozing down their lengths, sizzling and smoking like grease on a hot stove.
Fire in his hands, Remy was ready for just about anything, watching the angel with a cautious eye. The Seraphim whispered in the back of his mind: Kill your enemy. Do it now. . . . But Remy didn’t feel that this was necessary, which just made his warrior side all the more frantic.
Zophiel reached up, removing one of the burning spears sticking from his throat, and then the other. Angel blood flowed freely, running down the front of once golden armor in glistening, dark rivulets.
Attack. Attack. Attack. Attack, the Seraphim urged, but Remy stayed his hand.
Swaying as he stood, the Cherubim hefted his mighty sword. It now glowed brighter—hotter—in his grasp, happy to be back in its master’s possession.
It had been a very long time since Remy last held a weapon that he had bonded with, a weapon as much a part of him as any appendage. Flashes of the Great War exploded in his mind, and of the blood-caked sword that he had dropped upon the battlefield when the war was done.
When he was done.
“I am at an end,” the Cherubim weakly gurgled, holding the burning blade up so that he could look upon it. “I can do no more.”
Zophiel whipped the blade forward, tongues of flame leaping down its tarnished length to lick eagerly toward him.
Remy recoiled, but did not attack.
“Take it,” Zophiel commanded, releasing the large sword from his grip, letting it land at Remy’s feet. The fire that covered the blade dimmed as it lay there. “If the warrior’s heart still beats within your breast, you must rouse it, for the Kingdom of Heaven is threatened by things most foul.”
Zophiel slowly slid to his knees, the life going out of him as the blood from his injuries continued to flow.
“A cancer grows in the bosom of the Garden,” the Cherubim warned, his voice weaker. “A malignancy that cannot be allowed to spread.”
On his knees, Zophiel’s once
fearsome form grew more and more still, as fire as well as blood streamed from his wounds.
“Stop him, Remiel of the host Seraphim,” Zophiel begged as his body was slowly consumed by the fire of God leaving his dying body.
“Stop Malachi before it all crumbles to ruin.”
The words broke loose from Zophiel’s lips in a final whisper, the white-hot flames licking at the flesh of his body, surging to engulf his entire form in an inferno.
Remy watched as the fire burned white, temporarily blinding him with its intensity, before it receded, growing softer, until nothing remained but the burn mark where the Cherubim had knelt upon the wooden floor.
That and the still smoldering sword lying at Remy’s feet.
The Garden was in pain.
She had felt the illness growing inside of her for quite some time, felt it writhe as it slowly grew over the ages to maturation.
The sickness was inside . . . beneath her cool, fertile earth, feeding off the life energies of this vibrant Paradise.
Suckling upon the roots of the Tree.
It was new life that grew, dangerous life that yearned to be born.
Eden had tried to thwart their growth, making her skin shake and shift, inciting the more primitive life that lived upon and inside her to feed freely on this malignant invader.
But the illness was created to be strong, even in its earliest stages.
She had attempted to communicate with the multiple life-forms gestating within her bosom, wanting to know their purpose, and she learned that they had been created to survive, to usurp what had come before.
The Garden knew that this was wrong, that the things nestled inside her should not come to be, but she was helpless.
Those who could have protected her were long since banished.
She felt their presence out there in the ether, and she had reached out, singing for them to notice her, but they had been too far away to hear her voice.
To hear her pleas.
Until now.
After drifting for so very, very long, she was near her children again. There were more of them now: more to hear her cries for help.
Weakened by the goings-on inside her, the Garden called out as loudly as she could, hoping they would hear her call.
Hoping they would come as she grew nearer to them, and their world.
That they would come to the aid of their mother.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The sword cried out to him.
Remy gazed down to the floor, listening to the blade’s pleas. It was calling to him—begging him—to pick it up.
It wanted to tell him what it knew; it wanted him to be its new master.
He felt the Seraphim stir, the song of the blade incredibly powerful. It had been too long since the divine being had held a weapon forged in the fires of Heaven.
Before he could even question the action, Remy bent down, fingers wrapping around the sword’s hilt.
It was like taking hold of a live wire. His mind exploded in a searing flash of white, images forming from the fire that spread across the surface of his brain.
He saw the Garden. . . . No, he felt the Garden in every way that was possible. He saw through the eyes of the sword . . . through the eyes of Zophiel.
Something was wrong there. War was on the horizon, the air tinged with the acrid smell of blood, growing stronger as it drifted on the thick currents of air.
But there was something else. Something that had begun to affect the thick vegetation of the Garden paradise, tainting the earth beneath the sentry’s feet. The blade was warning him, driving him through the thick underbrush toward what would desecrate this most holy of places.
He emerged from the jungle to stand before the Tree.
The poison was there, and the Garden called out to him.
And then he saw that he was not the only of God’s divine creatures there.
The elder called Malachi was there at the Tree, and in his arms he held something that squirmed with life.
Something that did not belong.
The elder explained that everything was as it should be, though the sentry felt that something was wrong. Something was horribly, horribly wrong. Looking upon the pale thing that undulated in the elder’s arms, he felt a sense of revulsion, that what he was observing was not of God’s design.
Of God’s plan.
He was about to question the foul thing’s existence, but he did not have the chance. The elder moved faster than the speed of thought, a flash of burning dagger the last thing Zophiel saw before it plunged through the bone of his face and into his brain.
Turning the ordered world of the Lord God to madness.
There was a fire in Zophiel’s mind, a ravenous conflagration that consumed everything that he had ever known, replacing it with a jabbering insanity.
He could not remember what had led him to this, only that he was filled with a bloodlust that could not be quenched.
He must find what was responsible for this . . . and it must burn, and maybe then he would have the answers that eluded him.
Destruction would be his sustenance, feeding the madness that enshrouded him, and hopefully satisfying it so that one day, his sanity would be returned to him.
The images came in a torrential flow, the sentry’s ability to process what was happening, and the world around him, now nothing more than a jumble of sights, sounds, and smells.
For a moment Remy—Remiel—remembered who he was and that these were not his experiences, but the experiences of the Cherubim who had been given the sacred task of guarding Eden, but the recollections came furiously and the Seraphim was almost drowned in their relentless intensity.
The fires of madness raced across the surface of his mind, and Zophiel tried desperately to hold on to some recollection of the evil that threatened the Garden.
But it was gone, leaving only the insanity and a berserker rage over what had been stolen from him.
The battle in the Garden with the Seraphim Remiel was fierce. He had wanted to tell the warrior angel that something wasn’t right, but he was unable to do so. The thoughts and the words that needed to follow would not come. There was only the anger . . . and the disease of madness that plagued him.
The Cherubim fled the realm of Heaven to the stars, hoping to escape the insanity, but it clung like burning oil, eating away at him and his most holy purpose. Soon, the sentry knew, there would be little left; only the fury and destruction that followed in his wake would define him.
But in the world of God’s man, there came a change.
He could hear it far in the back of his mind, something that spoke to memories that had been buried so deep beneath layers of smoldering ash.
He did not understand what it spoke of, but felt the emotion that it roused in him, and knew that if he found this source, this irritating cacophony of visions, sounds, and smells, and destroyed it, that maybe . . . maybe he would remember what it was all about.
There were countless millennia of searching, most of the time the source of what he hunted having grown eerily silent, leaving him with only the jabbering insanity that had come to personify him.
The Cherubim haunted the Earth, searching . . . hunting . . . for the thing that would clear his mind, and free him from the slavery of madness.
He’d even worn the guise of one of God’s humans, hoping that perhaps whatever it was that he stalked could be tricked into emerging into the light so that he might see.
And eventually he did in fact see, and slowly, little by little, it was returned to him.
Zophiel recalled the dire threat to Eden, Heaven, and all the Heavenly hosts, as well as the one who was responsible.
Just in time to die.
Remiel felt the death of Zophiel as if it were his own, the fire of Heaven that burned hot and powerful at the center of his being suddenly burning so brightly . . . so furiously . . . and then it was gone, leaving behind a cold, creeping darkness that eventually became . . .
Nothing.
The shock of oblivion was enough for Remy to take his humanity back, to suppress his angelic nature enough to resume control, but it wasn’t an easy task.
The Seraphim was enraged by the thought of something that dared to threaten his Lord God, His Kingdom, and the Garden that He loved.
Remy placated the angry creature that lived inside him, promising him he would be set free to deal with the offenders in the only way that the Seraphim knew how.
Through the rite of combat.
The Seraphim knew that this was a battle that would test him, that there was a chance that he would not survive—that he could be vanquished by the Shaitan—but that was something the divine being always knew was a possibility.
And it made him yearn for the taste of violence all the more.
“All those years with the Sons of Adam,” Remy said, holding the blade tight, lifting it to eye level. “It wasn’t Malachi at all.”
“What?” Jon asked, moving closer, but stopping just before the pile of ash that had once been the Cherubim Zophiel.
“It was a Shaitan,” Remy explained.
“Shaitan,” Jon repeated. “And what exactly is that?”
“Something that shouldn’t even exist,” Remy said, his eyes drawn to the beauty of the blade that he held. He could feel it bonding with him, and he with it.
The Seraphim was very happy about this, a hum like some sort of prehistoric cat’s purr vibrating at his core.
“The Shaitan were an idea—a concept—when the Lord God and Malachi were creating the beings that would serve Him.”
“The first angels?” Jon suggested, attempting to understand what Remy was saying.
“No, something far darker,” Remy said. “Rumor has it that they were going to be made from the cold darkness that existed before God brought forth His divine light. But the Lord didn’t trust the darkness, choosing instead to fashion His messengers from a portion of His own inner glow.”
Remy paused, considering what he now knew.
“They were never supposed to exist,” he said. “They were never created.”