by Daniel Caet
“But a temple for whom? There are no figures of gods or mystical symbols beyond that sun.”
“I don't know, but now we know why there are no soldiers. There is simply nothing to protect. This place is nothing, the important thing is not this room is what happens in it. That is probably what your Heinrich must have felt, a ritual of some kind, but for what purpose?”
"There is another room downstairs, a larger one,” Liliath said, peering through a kind of ancient vent built to allow air circulation between the rooms.
“We better take a look.”
Helel went back to the stairs after making sure that there was still no one who could discover them and together they went down to the lower floor. That floor was identical to the upper one, with the same short corridor that ended in a door, only this time the door was solid wood and when they tried to open it they found that it was not closed. The room to which it gave access, however, was very different from that of the upper floor. Much more extensive and illuminated with large candlesticks with burning candles. The outermost part of the room was surrounded by twelve stone pedestals and in the center a large circle of the same material surrounded a fire that seemed to come directly from the ground.
“If the room above is a temple, this must be its sancta sanctorum, that would explain the burning fire and the candles around.”
“I don't like this, Helel. I have a bad feeling. I think it would be better if we left before …”
Liliath couldn't finish the sentence. A muffled groan came out of her mouth as the edge of a sword pierced her back and ran down her chest. In an instant the figure carrying the weapon recovered the sword and threw aside Liliath's body that hit one of the pedestals.
“Liliath!” Helel shouted as a black sword like obsidian materialised in his hand. He tried to get close to her, but the figure got in his way. Becca could not see who it was because he was covered in a blinding light as she had seen Jofiel a few days before, but it was clear that Helel had been able to recognise the newcomer as his face disenchanted by surprise testified.
“Abaddon, is that you?” Helel asked, unable to give credit to his eyes. “What is all this, brother?”
“After so many years, Helel, you are still able to surprise me with your pathetic innocence. I never thought it would be so easy to attract you to the mousetrap, you're still as gullible as ever.”
The light surrounding the figure went out and Becca could see that it was a tall, dark man dressed in a completely black military uniform with no symbol identifying him as a member of any army. His hair, combed completely backwards, accentuated his hard features like stone and in his hand a silver-coloured sword showed an intense glow only muffled by Liliath's blood that still slid down its edge.
“What are you talking about Abaddon? What's this all about? I thought you were dead.”
“Surprised? You thought what I wanted you to think, moron! What a disappointment! The truth is that I trusted that the lord of hell would be a bit of a challenge. What can we do?” he spitted and at the same time dealt a blow with his sword that Helel stopped with his at the last moment making the metallic sound of the crash rumble in the room. “I see you have a new sword. Not that it's going to help you, of course.” he went on, continuing to attack Helel with a series of thrusts.
“Abaddon, it is enough! Brother! Stop, please!”
“I'm not your brother, damn bastard, I've never been. I will never understand how you could be our father's favourite. Did his compliments blunt you and spoil you so much that you were not able to see what I had prepared for you?”
“What did you have prepared?" What do you mean? Why would you do anything against me? You've always been the one who loved me the most,” Helel said visibly upset.
“All part of a pantomime. I've always despised you, your damn perfection, your way of abusing our father's love and the way he allowed it while the rest of us had to beg for the crumbs of his love, the arrogance with which you walked among us knowing you were his favourite. He who must have been wise, behaved like a fool led by the ridiculous love for his perfect creation and thereby created a monster. But there are monsters bigger than you in this world, little brother. I still can't believe how easy it has been to manipulate you and the pathetic archangels. Did you really think they were the ones behind all this? They are another group of arrogant beings who do not see beyond their own noses. But when someone has such an important ego it is easily manageable and that has been my advantage.”
“I can't believe you, you lie! You are not Abaddon, you are not the brother I met and loved!”
"Indeed, I am not because you never met me. In the end everything was so simple. Everything was revealed the day that I could finally understand all the lies that surrounded me, all of heaven’s lies. For eons we were instilled in the idea that our father was the engine of the world, that nothing could exist without him and how blindly we transmitted that message everywhere. Lie! I have withdrawn God from the world and the world has continued on its way. Throughout our existence we were told that we were the culmination of creation, made in his image and likeness. Lie! Then the humans arrived and that damn old man began to drool over these pathetic monkeys. We were led to believe that everything that happened in the world was at the express will of our father and that he was the only one with absolute power. Lie! It was I who caused your downfall and I who snatched your light condemning you to the abyss of mortality, I had the power to condemn you and he could do nothing to prevent it. And all those lies have given way to one single truth, mine. A truth that will dominate the world as our father must have done, with fire and anger. And all the spoils of our father's creation will kneel before me or feed the earthworms!”
“You've lost your mind, you don't know what you're doing!”
“On the contrary, little brother, I know very well. Actually the appearance of this Hitler was very convenient. A human with the ambition and madness necessary to be easily manageable. And with a little help and resources, he was able to subjugate the world of humans and bring them to their knees. Obviously, as soon as the conquest of the planet is over, I will get rid of him and the world will recognise me as its new god. There will be no more lies because I will be a true god, a god they will learn to fear. As you can imagine,” he continued as he walked around the room with an air that reminded Becca of a panther, “humans were only one piece of the puzzle. The demons were the other and my pawn to conquer the underworld was your fucking bastard, until you decided to get in the middle and thwarted me all the plans. I thought that the attack on the family that you had tenderly accepted as yours would scare you enough to keep you away. A miscalculation on my part. I have to admit that the fact that you ripped out your son's heart and became lord of hell is something I didn't see coming. But finally it was only a small delay in my plan. A bit of negative publicity and we made you the enemy of men, the fallen angel, Satan. A few of your decapitated lieutenants and you came running to me like a fly into honey. It is true that my plan has taken a few thousand years to complete, but what does it matter when you are eternal? The only thing that matters is that this is the end. With your death I will become lord of hell, your subjects will kneel before me and help me to tear once and for all the belly of the human world and then, all creation, heaven, earth and hell will fall at my feet. There is the inconvenience of your sword, of course. Another little mistake on my part. I thought that taking away your grace and making you become a human would have put an end to any remote possibility that you would interfere with my plans and I thought that the gesture of giving you the sword would make you trust me even more and follow my advice to stay away from everything that pertained to heaven. But of course, I couldn't count on damn Enoch to discover that the sword was really the key to your return to the celestial kingdom. Fortunately, I managed to get that same information from him before Michael killed him and, since then, I've been trying to find that sword before you. Your little bitch,” he said, pointing to Liliath lying on the f
loor unconscious “did us a favour with that spell that prevents you from locating it, but it wasn't enough. Fortunately that pathetic Himmler and his obsession with mystical objects came very handy, although I must admit that by now I had expected to find it; but as I said, there is no hurry when you are eternal.”
Helel did not answer. His hands twitching on the hilt of the sword and his head bowed like those of a stone statue, with no sign of life. Until suddenly his voice echoed in the room.
“Let me add some more lies to your list, brother. We were taught that our father's love is the only source of all our power. Lie, I have discovered that the power of hatred and revenge is much greater,” he said, taking a step toward Abaddon and making the ground tremble. “Men have turned their backs on me thanks to your tricks to make me become the enemy. Lie, you'll soon see that men worship more than one god, some of them as dark as me,” he continued and another step shook the room even more and Abaddon's face contracted without knowing very well what was happening. “I've fallen like a fly in your honey trap with no help other than a woman's. Lie. I never travel alone little brother.”
Helel raised his face to stare at Abaddon as he dealt a blow of his sword that unbalanced him while multiple demons materialised in the room and began attacking the angel as if they were a swarm appearing and disappearing around him causing Abaddon not to know on which side the blows came and his attempts to defend himself were futile. Helel on the other hand materialised next to Liliath immediately and taking her body in her arms he disappeared without a trace.
A moment later the image was transformed into smoke again and Becca felt her body experience again the sensation of being dragged into a kind of whirlwind. When her eyes finally opened she was sitting on the floor of the throne room with his father kneeling beside her.
“Are you okay?”
“I suppose. I think I'm getting used to this,” she lied.
“Come, sit here,” Helel said, helping her up and sitting her on the throne. Becca thought it was weird to find herself sitting in the chair of the regent of hell, but said nothing. “That story you've shown me …”
“That day,” Helel interrupted, “was when I discovered the truth of everything that had happened to me and the rest of our family from the moment of my fall and that's why I thought it was good that you saw it, so you could understand, not who you face, but what.”
“What do you mean?”
“Rebecca, in this life the great enemies are not the people, not even their actions, their ideas are. If someone feels reaffirmed by the validity of their ideas they will not stop until they get what they set out or die trying. And the case of my brother Abaddon is no different.”
“Do you still call him brother?”
“Well, he will always be because we were born of the same light, no matter how much his path separates from mine, he will always be my brother.”
“What happened to him? Did your demons kill him?”
“Oh no, not at all! They would not have been able to, even if they wanted to, his power is too great. I'm afraid he's alive and his hatred for me has spread to my family. His plans with Hitler failed, as you well know, because he never counted on the fact that human beings would unite to face that horror and make him fail. But that inconvenience has not made him give up his intentions. Unfortunately, horrors he can use for his purposes, in this world there are plenty.”
“What happened to my mother?”
“I took your mother as far away from that castle as I could, but I soon discovered that there is a power that the underworld cannot give me, the ability to heal an angelic sword wound. And so I found myself in the middle of a forest, without time to ask for help and without being able to heal your mother. Fortunately, your mother managed to gather the strength to show me an image, a place. And without knowing if that was what she wanted from me, I reacted on impulse and transported us to the place she showed me. A second later we were in the middle of the square of a small town in the mountains of Romania that I think you know quite well,” Helel said smiling sweetly to Becca, “those people took care of Liliath and managed to stop the bleeding, but they told me that there was only one way to save her life, one that could change her forever.”
"Which one?”
“Let me show you something,” he replied as he offered his hand to help her up. Helel guided her behind the throne along the rocky wall behind an invisible path from anywhere else in the room. After a few minutes through that rocky tunnel, Becca's eyes filled with an intense light and a world of colours unfolded before her. The tunnel ended in an opening on the side of what looked like a mountain and from there she could see an immense extension of pastures dotted with trees and traveled by a large river that seemed to flow into a great lake in the distance.
“It's not exactly the image you would associate with hell, right?” Helel said, smiling broadly at the sight of Becca's surprised face.
“Of course not, I would never have imagined it!”
“That is the River Styx, one of the five rivers of hell that flows into the great lake that you see at the end.”
“I remember some of this from my history classes, but I thought it was a dark river that flowed into a swamp or something.”
“Yes, that is the perception that humans have of hell. And to be honest, in hell there are many kingdoms, some of them not very different from that description, but there is also room for beauty. The river Styx is the bearer of the very essence of hell and that is why it feeds everything, it is the purest source of energy in the underworld and, in order to save your mother, I had no choice but to submerge her in its waters. At that time I could not know if exposure to such an amount of underworld energy would change your mother in some way, but it did not matter in order to save her life.”
Becca listened to her father's words as she looked at that stream of water and her interior seemed to vibrate with the sound that reached her ears. Her whole body seemed to respond as if it were a familiar sound, a known energy and, somehow, she noticed how her power grew inside.
“You've noticed, right? Your body has recognised the energy.”
“Yes, it's something like that,” said Becca doubtfully. "But how is it possible? I have never been here.”
“Come, let's go down,” Helel said, leading her down a side road that led down to the river. “After your mother recovered, it only took a few days to reorganise consignments to take prisoners from the concentration camps and the ghettos. Her commitment was absolute and there was no way to convince her otherwise. And I helped her. At first I did it because I felt guilty about what had happened to her for dragging her to Wewelsburg, but it soon became clear that there were other reasons. I don't know if it was the fact of having a common goal or that there are simply things from which not even the lord of hell can escape, but the reality is that it was not long before Liliath and I fell in love again in such an intense way as when we had met in Uruk. Time passed, the war ended, and your mother and I went to live in a cabin in the Swiss Alps, close to all the children whose lives we had helped save. It was not easy to combine a life like that of any human with my role here, as you can imagine, but, somehow, our love made everything much simpler. And so almost fifty years passed.”
“You were living in a cabin just like that for fifty years?”
"Yes, believe it or not, and during all that time we were almost able to forget everything that had happened to us and I think we came to convince ourselves that we could have a life like that of any other human being. Only we weren't any other human being.”
Helel had taken her to the river's edge and now she played with her hand in the crystal clear waters of the stream that shone as if it were impregnated with glitter.
“What happened?”
“Well,” he said, turning to look at her, “what really happened was you. Although it took me a while to find out. One day,” he continued,“Liliath disappeared without explanation and never came back. I traveled the entire world for months search
ing everywhere thinking about the worst without assuming that, what had really happened, was something as simple as that Liliath had conceived a child, our child and as every mother, she did what she thought was best for protect you.”
“Protect me from what?”
“From me, of course," Helel confessed. “Your conception was not planned, we would have never even thought it was possible. But the moment you began to exist, Liliath feared what I could do when I knew. She simply thought that I would see you as the instrument to get my sword and by extension my revenge on heaven and that would be greater than my love as a father. And, the truth, although at that moment I could not understand it, I cannot blame her given my history. A few months after your birth,” he continued,“I could find her track and I knew that she had been living in the gypsy village again, but by then she had already received Sadith's help and both you and her were out of my reach. Or that is what I wanted everyone to believe.”
“How?”
“What is the furthest memory you have of your time before college in Canada?” Helel replied with another question for Becca's frustration.
“None, I don't remember anything from that time.”
“That's not true, think!”
“I tell you that I don't remember anything, my first memory is from school, I don't remember anything from home or from …” Becca fell silent when she realised her mistake. “Genevieve.”
“Do you remember anything about her?”
"I remember her room, the painting over the fireplace. Laughs, I remember playing with her in that room,” she said, recalling that image that had come to her mind in Duncan Hall.
“Go a little further, focus on that memory, explore that image.”
Becca obeyed without knowing very well what he hoped to get out of all that. The image of Genevieve playing with her in that bed, making her jump on the bed while she laughed and screamed with happiness. That image filled her immediately with joy, an unexpected and uncontrollable joy and, suddenly, when she thought the memory ended there, the scene continued. Her face turned and lit up when she recognised what she saw, and Genevieve's arms took her to deposit her on the floor of the room while her little legs ran out to the door screaming a single word. Papa. Her eyes looked at the face of the man who received her with open arms and a smile that occupied his entire face and then threw her into the air to Becca’s rejoice. That face that looked at her with an undeniable paternal pride was the same one that was in front of her today.