Dancing on the Head of a Pin (31 page)

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.

“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 warm 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.

But soon he realized that it was not clouds at all.

A great army flew through the sky toward him.

An army of angels.

Heaven’s air was filled with the sound of pounding wings as they approached—swarming across the sky, descending on the other side of the Gate that separated them.

“Hail, Remiel,” an angel at the head of the flock cried, the first to touch down.

He was adorned from head to toe in intricate armor of gold, as if the rays of the sun had been used to create the ornate adornment for him, and for all the angelic soldiers that landed behind him.

As the leader strode closer to the Gate, he removed his helmet, and a sick feeling writhed in the pit of Remy’s belly as he recognized this angel.

“Greetings, Michael,” Remy said, bowing his head slightly in respect for the leader of the mighty Archangels.

The Gates parted, and the Archangel strode through them. “Heaven knows of your involvement in the most delicate and dire of matters,” the warrior angel stated, stopping before Remy. “Your arrival here before the Gates, stinking of the pit, implies that a great danger to Heaven, and all of creation, has not been averted.”

Remy studied the angel before him, and all those that had descended with him from the sky. They were clad in the armor of war, a telling sign that they were very much aware of what had transpired.

“The Thrones are no more,” Remy said, watching for some sign that this was a surprise. There was nothing; the sharp angular features of the angelic warrior remained passionless. “Destroyed by the newly awakened Lucifer Morningstar.”

A violent shudder ran through Michael’s brown-speckled wings, the only sign that he was affected by this news at all.

“I suspected no good would come from their scheme,” the angel stated, obviously referring to the Thrones’ plan to remove Lucifer from Tartarus. “They used forbidden magicks to make him forget who he was . . . what he was,” Michael continued with disdain. “And then they made him believe he was another . . . another of the lowly, absolution seekers that had sinned against the All-Father.”

The Archangel paused.

“What we feared most has occurred.” The angel turned to the army that stood beyond the Gate. “But we stand ready to deal with this impending threat.”

“So it’s war again?” Remy asked, an oppressive sense of sadness sweeping over him, replacing the euphoria of his return.

Michael turned, revealing the most disturbing of expressions. The Archangel wore a smile, and there was a glint of excitement in his piercing eyes.

“War,” he repeated as he reached down and drew the sword hanging from the scabbard at his side. “For the kingdom and the glory of Heaven.”

He raised the blade high, and all those behind him did the same.

Remy’s warrior nature was aroused by the sight before him, eager to join their number, to again wield a weapon in service to the Lord God Almighty.

But there was also a part troubled by the sight, by a nagging voice from somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind that warned the coming war would make the first pale in comparison.

“You haven’t learned a thing,” Remy said to the armored Archangel.

Michael scowled. “We’ve learned that the battle is never truly over until your enemies are utterly vanquished.”

“And the grace of mercy?” Remy asked.

“Mercy,” the Archangel scoffed. “You see now where mercy has brought us.”

And Remy saw exactly where it had brought them. There had been no healing since the conflict that altered the very nature of Heaven; in fact, he believed the wound caused by the war now festered with infection.

He hadn’t the slightest idea what could be done to cure this illness, and, to be honest, was unsure if it wasn’t already too late. Looking about, he saw what he had not noticed before, the patches of tarnish that stained the shiny surfaces of their armor, the gray haze that hung over the city in the distance like an abandoned spider’s web, a hint of something sickly sweet lingering in the breeze that could very well have been decay.

“Will you fight with us, brother?” Michael asked, holding out the blade of his sword toward Remy.

The pounding of flapping wings filled the air again, and two angels not of the warrior class flew down to land on either side of the Archangel. Each was holding a pitcher of fragrant water and watched Remy with wary eyes.

“Allow them to cleanse the stain of Hell from your person,” Michael said as the two angels slowly stepped forward. “Then you will once again be allowed to pass through the Gates of Heaven.”

Remy started to move away and the advancing angels looked nervously back to Michael.

“What is it?” the Archangel asked. “Is there something wrong?”

Remy slowly nodded. “There is,” he said. “And the sad thing is, there is nothing I can do to fix it.”

The Archangel sheathed his weapon. “You do understand that you are to be welcomed back into the fold,” he explained. “That your desertion of duty is to be overlooked as restitution for the services that you performed in the service of Heaven.”

Remy shook his head. “I don’t want to come back,” he told the warrior. “I was given a task by the Morningstar . . . to deliver the message that he was free, and the sad fact that the war isn’t over. I’ve done that now, and now I’m through here.”

Michael gripped the hilt of his sword tightly. “How does it feel to abandon everything that you are?” the Archangel asked, malice dripping from each and every word.

It couldn’t have hurt worse if the angel had driven his blade through Remy’s chest.

“I’ve changed,” Remy told him. “It isn’t what I am anymore.”

He couldn’t stay. The war in Heaven had nearly destroyed him once; he wasn’t about to give it the chance to do so again.

“What are you?” the Archangel Michael asked of him. “What are you if not of Heaven?”

He’d believed that it was dead—or at least close to being that way—but he had been mistaken. Remy felt his humanity, weak and buried so very deep, but still alive. It fluttered at the question, finding the strength to fight.

To survive.

And with the realization that it still lived, he turned away from the gathering of angels, from Heaven itself.

Feeling the pull of Earth upon him.

The pull of the world that had become his home.

 

The journey from Heaven to Earth was a long one.

Remy lost track of time as he drifted in the void between worlds, descending from on high, moving through one plane of reality to the next.

Some of these were dreadful worlds, full of dreadful creatures that would have liked nothing more than to feed upon the flesh of the divine. And through those fearsome worlds Remy traveled, avoiding conflict when he was able, and, if he needed to, vanquishing any challenger that dared try and prevent him from reaching his destination.