As the fallen were killed, their once-divine forms exploding into clouds of ash, the Thrones paid little attention to their demise. All eyes—each and every one of the large, piercing orbs that covered the seething masses of power—were fixed upon Remy.
He could feel their gazes burning into his flesh and then he heard their roaring command.
“End his life.”
Their voices were overwhelming, like every sound in existence—the beautiful and the harsh, the melodic and the earsplittingly painful, all combined to give them voice.
Remy immediately dropped the battle-axe at his feet, bending forward, covering his ears with his hands, though it did him little good, for the Thrones spoke inside his head as well.
“I . . . don’t understand,” Remy cried. It took every bit of strength he had remaining to stay on his feet.
“Do as we command before it is too late,” the Thrones cried. It was like having an atomic weapon set off inside his skull.
Still bent over, Remy looked up into the multiple eyes of his tormentors, squinting through their radiance as he attempted to understand what they wanted of him.
“I don’t . . .”
The orbs of divine power surged closer, tentacles of energy moving across the ground, bodies of dead fallen exploding to drifting bits of nothing at their pernicious touch.
“There was always a fear that something of this magnitude would occur,” the Thrones announced. “So he was removed. Placed where he would no longer be a threat . . . where he could do no harm.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Remy screamed, the coppery taste of blood filling his mouth. His nose and ears were leaking from the Thrones’ assault, and he wanted it to stop, but most of all he wanted to understand.
“He was never supposed to return here.”
“Tell me who you’re talking about!” Remy cried, lurching toward the emissaries from Heaven.
“There is no time!” the Thrones wailed, one of the snaking appendages of fiery energy touching something on the ground and hurling it at him.
Remy caught the object, surprised at the sudden wave of familiarity he experienced on contact. He gripped the pistol tightly in his hand, the familiar voice of the weapon present inside his head again.
Kill him!
The eyes were looking past him, focusing on the object of their obsession, and Remy slowly turned to gaze at the pathetic form of Madach. The fallen angel stood slump shouldered, his body beaten and lacerated, his clothes hanging from his broken shape in bloodstained tatters.
He seemed to be in a sort of trance, staring down at the shattered remains of Lucifer’s pall.
“Him?” Remy asked, turning back to the Thrones. “You want me to kill Madach?”
The Colt became euphoric, not because of the why or whom it was to be used upon, but because it had the opportunity to do what it had been created for. It urged Remy on, telling him in a hissing voice like radio static to do as he was told.
Remy ignored the Pitiless, waiting for some sort of answer, something that would make sense of the murderous act that the Thrones were demanding of him.
And then Madach began to chuckle.
Remy turned away from Heaven’s emissaries to look at the fallen angel.
He was hunched no longer, standing perfectly straight, with his hands hanging down at his sides.
“Madach?” Remy questioned, not seeing the humor.
“It’s all clear to me now,” Madach stated, smiling so wide that it seemed to split his face.
“Do it! Do it! Do it! Do it! Do it! Do it!” the Thrones shrieked inside his head. Through eyes tearing with pain, Remy watched Madach.
“I’m free,” he said, his eyes glinting a golden yellow.
A million questions filled Remy’s head, but he knew that there wasn’t time for a one of them.
The wounds—the cuts and abrasions—that the fallen had received during his tribulations in the underworld had begun to glow. An eerie white light starting to seep from somewhere inside him.
No longer trusting Remy to do what they asked, the Thrones made their move. Their spherical bodies began to glow like miniature suns, as they merged their masses to form one enormous globe of eyes and fire.
A tentacle of fire grew from the burning surface, lashing out like a whip. Remy barely avoided the ferocious attack, his wings smoldering with the intensity of the heat as he leapt from harm’s way. He rolled onto his back, extinguishing the unearthly fire eating at his wings.
Shielding his face and eyes, he peered through the searing brightness, barely able to make out the shapes of the sunlike Throne and its enemy.
Questions raced through his mind as he watched and waited for the inevitable outcome.
Then the horrible screams of the divine erupted in the air.
Remy crawled to his feet, stumbling back, trying to escape the oppressive sound that was exploding all around and inside him.
It was the Thrones. Somehow, the Thrones were screaming. There was a burst of light. Remy reacted instinctively, looking away just in time, before his eyes could be burned black in their sockets. When he turned back, through vision obstructed with dancing black spots and expanding circles of color, he saw the most disturbing of sights.
The fire of the single, great Throne had been extinguished, and the Thrones had returned to their individual states. But no longer did they float above the ground, spinning and turning, casting off tongues of fire. Now they simply lay upon the ground like spherical lumps of cooling volcanic rock.
But most horrible was what had happened to their eyes.
Their eyes were now no more than smoldering wet craters dripping with a viscous fluid that formed steaming puddles on the cold ground of Tartarus.
All except for one.
Madach had left each of them a single eye, and those eyes watched him now, filled with something the Thrones had likely never known.
Fear.
For Madach wasn’t Madach anymore, and Remy stood paralyzed by the mind-numbing realization.
The fallen angel’s damaged skin had begun to slough away, revealing new, bronze-colored flesh beneath. He was still smiling—even wider than he had been before—wiping the old, loose skin from the new, muscular form beneath.
Madach isn’t Madach anymore.
Magnificent wings as black as the night unfurled from his back, languidly teasing the air, flexing powerful muscles that had not been used for so very long.
Remy stared with wonder. He’d always thought that the Lord God Almighty had ripped those impressive black appendages from his shoulders before casting him down to Hell.
And then Madach ripped the mask of flesh from his face, and even though Remy already knew who it was that now stood before him, he still gasped at the sight.
In awe of him.
In awe of the Morningstar.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Thrones’ cryptic words finally made sense.
He was never supposed to return here.
And now Remy knew why they were so desperate for him to have killed Madach.
What he’d feared most had happened, not exactly in the way that he thought it might, but it had happened.
Lucifer was free.
Remy hadn’t a clue what he should be doing, and so he stood, frozen in place, watching as the Son of the Morning looked about him, like a new tenant surveying the empty space of an apartment, deciding where the furniture should go.
And then his golden-flecked eyes fell upon Remy.
Remy met that gaze without fear, remembering a time when this powerful being once stood at the right hand of God, but also recalling the rebellion that the Morningstar had perpetrated. The Seraphim nature remembered the battles and the bloodshed as well as who was ultimately responsible, and it would not wither before the angel’s commanding stare.
Sensing no imminent danger, Lucifer looked away, his awesome wings unfurling completely from his back. The dark angel leapt into the air. Hoverin
g above the chamber, he raised his arms, fingers extended. Head tossed back in a cry of effort, the Morningstar began to exert control over his surroundings.
The ground began to tremble, a slight vibration at first, followed by tremors so great that it was difficult stay upright.
Remy felt helpless. Certainly he could have listened to the urgings of his angelic nature, flying up to confront the first of the fallen, but he knew that it would make little difference.
Lucifer was free, and Hell was his to command.
From beneath the dead, the Pitiless emerged. The weapons created from the Morningstar’s essence flew up into the air of the prison chamber to hover before their true owner. Their master.
“These have served their purpose well.” Lucifer’s voice boomed, and Remy watched as the weapons began to lose shape, becoming like smoke that swirled around the Morningstar, eventually being absorbed into his golden body, as he took back the power he had cast off so very long ago.
His already perfect form seemed to become even more immaculate, glowing like a star—a morning star—and bathing the once-icy chamber in his radiance.
The walls began to creak and groan, large portions of ancient ice sliding from the walls to shatter upon the floor.
“They sought to keep me from . . . this.” Lucifer’s voice carried above the rhythmic beating of his awesome wingspan.
And with those words, the Son of the Morning threw out his arms, accepting his environment. The ground writhed like ocean waves; the walls crumbled.
Remy was forced to the air, and he watched in growing horror and awe as the ceiling of the chamber fell away to reveal the tarnished sky of Hell.
Tartarus was crumbling.
Remy flew through the air, dodging huge sections of the ice prison as they came hurtling down at him.
In the icy rubble below he saw them begin to appear, fallen angels that had not been freed in the initial attack. They crawled out from beneath the remains of their prison cells, haunted faces turned toward the heavens of Hell.
Up toward their lord and master.
The light of the Morningstar bathed the Hellish landscape, and like the spread of the most virulent disease, it too began to writhe and change. The ground shook, its dry, blighted surface beginning to crack, huge, miles-long fissures zigzagging like bolts of lightning across the surface. New mountains surged up from the ground where there had been none.
Riding the powerful updrafts of air, Remy watched with a mixture of wonder and horror as the land was transformed with little regard to those below. The fallen skittered about for safety, many of them falling victim to the shifting ground and the hungry fissures that would swallow them whole.
Hell has to eat if it is to change, to grow into something else.
Remy listened to their screams, their pleas to a god that flew above them, but their cries fell upon deaf ears.
Outrage spurred him on, and before he knew what he was doing, Remy was flying toward the Morningstar; the closer he got, the greater his rage.
There had been the slightest bit of hope, a kernel of chance that the countless millennia of imprisonment had done something to change the attitude of God’s once favored, that he had learned from his monumental error in judgment.
That he was repentant.
Remy hadn’t a clue as to what he would do once he reached his opponent, weaponless except for the brute strength of his kind, but he could not stop himself now.
Here was the being responsible for the event that had changed his existence—changed the very nature of Heaven and what it meant to be a servant of God.
Lucifer’s hand wrapped around Remy’s throat in a grip of iron, stopping the Seraphim’s attack with bone-jarring ease.
That glimmer of hope, that kernel of chance was quickly dispelled as the first of the fallen looked down into his eyes. And all Remy could see reflected in that golden-flecked gaze, was a seething fury, anger barely held in check.
“I could end you with the merest flick of my wrist,” Lucifer said, his voice a soft whisper, nearly lost in the cacophonous sounds of a Hell in transition.
Remy felt the grip on his throat grow tighter, the pressure inside his skull so great that he wondered if the top of his head might explode.
“But something prevents me.” Lucifer drew him closer, studying Remy’s straining features.
“You meant something to the being I was,” the Morningstar stated. It was as if a door inside his mind had been suddenly opened, revealing the secret contents held inside, the experiences of a fallen called Madach.
“You believed in my repentance.”
The fingers around Remy’s throat opened, releasing him, and he swam backward through the air, away from his foe.
“For that belief you shall live,” Lucifer said, looking down at the morphing landscape of Hell. The cries of the fallen as they fought to survive drifted in the air like a perverted birdsong.
“And with this gift, I give you purpose.”
Lucifer extended a muscular arm, his long, delicate fingers splayed.
Remy felt the air around him immediately charged. He tried to escape by dropping down to the chaotic terrain that twisted and changed below, but he was held fast by the Morningstar’s will.
“You will be my messenger,” Lucifer said. “You will tell them of my return, that their best-laid plans were for naught, and that they will pay for their transgressions against me.”
The air around him began to crackle, the fabric of Hell’s reality beginning to tear.
Lucifer was opening a passage.
But to where?
“As to when, that will be for me to decide.”
The portal opened with a terrible sucking sound, and Remy found himself pulled into the blistering cold of its infinite darkness. He tried to stop himself, to hold on to the sides of the puncture made in the sky above Hell, but the pull was too great, and he slipped into the void, the final, chilling words of Lucifer Morningstar sending him on his way.
“For I have a kingdom to build.”
Remy was deposited before the Gates, the stink of Hell radiating from his angelic form.
He fell to his knees as the wound in time and space healed behind him. Eager to breathe in anything other than shadow, he gasped, taking in hungry lungfuls of the suddenly hospitable environment.
He felt the soft earth beneath his knees, the golden-colored grass that tickled the palms of his hands, the fragrant, nearly intoxicating smell of the air; it had been a very long time since he’d been to this place.
But it was impossible to forget.
A fine haze covered the golden plains of grass, but then a gentle breeze stirred, moving aside the curtain of mist to reveal the Gates. Two enormous posts that looked to be fashioned of finely polished bone, or as said some who’d managed to catch a glimpse of the magnificent sight, and remained alive to speak of it, pearl.
Remy rose to his feet upon wobbling legs, lurching forward, drawn toward the magnificent sight.
Toward the only thing that separated him from the kingdom of Heaven.
He could see it there in the distance, through the intricate metalwork that hung between the awesome posts.
Flashes of memory were stirred, and he recalled when last he’d passed through this gateway. It had been at the close of the war, and he thought it would be the last time.
He had abandoned Heaven, or more accurately, Heaven had abandoned him.
Remy stood before the shuttered gates, a glimpse of Heaven partially obscured by the blowing mist beyond them, and knew a serenity that he’d not felt in a very long time.
His Seraphim nature was calmed by the return, sedated by the sight of the golden kingdom beyond the entrance. And deep inside, a little bit more of the humanity that he’d worked so hard to create died.
He reached out, prepared to push the Gates open and stride toward the vast city of light, to deliver the message given to him by its most fallen son.
His hands had barely touched the w
arm metal when there was a brilliant flash and he was repelled. He lay on the ground stunned, his entire body numbed as if by a million volts of electricity. Gradually, feeling returned, and he cautiously climbed to his feet.
Have I been barred from Heaven? His thoughts raced as he again readied to approach the gateway. Is this some sort of punishment for my leaving after the war?
Off in the distance, above the spires of the Heavenly kingdom, Remy saw that it had grown dark, as if storm clouds now hung over the city and were spreading across the skies of Heaven.