The Eden Chronicles Boxset

by S. K Munt

  And it was not just the supernatural beings that saw this take place- humans everywhere were shocked, appalled and awed by God’s power and as they cried out their love, he cast them up into Heaven- growing stronger with each life that he took. Some lands were unpopulated, so God let them be, but people tried to hide in others, living off the land and cowering in their homes, but God sent forth plagues of locusts to swarm and destroy the crops to chase these people out of hiding and give them the chance to appeal to him. Satan he knew, could be anywhere but she’d certainly be with people, not hiding in some cavern alone and so he was going to find her if he had to end the life of every last person on earth with his bare hands, and take his time doing it.

  Creating the world had taken a heartbeat, perfecting the world for the good of the human race had taken millions of years but in the end- destroying it took just over nine hundred days. People tried to survive, but word of God’s return spread, as well as being photographed, recorded and circulated until the humans saw that resistance was futile. Some lay down and waited for him to find them, others took their own lives and screamed their love for God first, others allowed the carnage to swallow them whole with open arms, but many fought back and God knew these were the unbelievers. He demanded their love but when they did not grant it, he left them to die or fend for themselves without wasting his time in convincing them, and he didn’t have the heart to destroy them to end their suffering. He had enough souls to fortify Heaven for an eternity, but if he wanted to wipe out Satan’s cancerous influence, he had to take out the source, not the people who were symptomatic of her hatred- those he would be able to handle all at once in the end.

  Miguel had known where Satan was at the time of her ultimate betrayal, but by the time he returned to the earth, she was gone and he found himself drawn to the edge of the wasteland that had been Barachiel amidst the carnage. He was supposed to be looking for Satan and her black-feathered minions, but someone was calling out to him, and though he could not tell who it was for the chaos and millions fleeing the epicentre of the nuclear strike, he knew that he could not leave until he had answered that prayer. And so he salvaged soul after dying soul, making the bodies of the dead vanish while taking the souls of those dying, or those who asked for his help up to Heaven. He worked and worked and though he did not find the soul screaming to him by the name Saint Michael, the way that he heard it in his heart, he found many others in equal need and this distracted him from his mounting frustration.

  But strangely, it was the survivors who he would have made a priority over the other mortals, who refused to give him the word that they loved God. Instead, they shooed him away and went back to what they were doing, determined to save and not be saved by the God they’d been told did not love them. Their actions were self-sacrificing and pious, but their hearts had hardened toward the lord long before and because Miguel did not want to see them taken up by Satan, he let them be and worked around them, praying that they would change their minds before the very end came.

  One of the survivors was a young male trainee doctor, Korbin, who had set up a makeshift hospital in an abandoned building and was attempting to minister to over three hundred sick and dying people alone- and resented God because he’d lost his father to cancer at the age of nine and now his angel was trying to stop him from saving other children’s fathers too. There was also an elderly, ex-marine who was digging graves for the people who’d been left to rot in the earth, and he was furious to be stopped and laughed off Miguel’s pleas to love God, whom he had lost faith in, decades before during the Vietnam War. Another was an unattractive female scientist, Maryah, who wanted to stay and urge people away from ground zero to places that she believed might be safe, and when Miguel told her that there was no place safe left in the world, she spat at him and told him that she hadn’t stretched her brain to the limits of scientific exploration for her entire life, just to be told by a shirtless man wearing wings that he understood radiation better.

  ‘I know how fallout works, and where we will be safe from it too!’ she screamed. ‘Men- and religious men- you’re all the same! I suppose you’re going to try and tell me that dinosaurs never existed either, huh? Yes well, off you go!’ Miguel tried to correct her and point out the fact that his wings actually worked and that in itself was proof of God, but she started throwing rocks at him- big ones- and he left not only because he was laughing too hard, but because she was tiring herself further in her need to scare him off, and if he didn’t give her a chance to calm down, she would probably drop dead from exhaustion anyway.

  Ironically, it was the first woman he’d ever met who didn’t fall at his feet, but she would not be the last and it was during the apocalypse that Miguel finally found a cure to his only flaw- his ego- because suddenly, people were lining up to tell him how useless and unappealing he was.

  One of the girls who fought him off the most violently had run a great distance with a deceased infant in her arms, and did not think that she deserved to end up in Heaven, for having failed the child. When Miguel tried to grab her, she ran so fast away from him that in his fatigue, he could not keep up on human feet and so he sighed and vowed to find her later when he’d revived, if she survived. There was also a middle-aged man who had been building a structure to shelter survivors who couldn’t move from the acid rains and fallout that was surely coming, and resented being interrupted because he had cancer and was dying anyway, and there was an older, gay gentleman who refused to leave his deceased lover’s side. Instead, he had lain down beside him to hold onto love until the end came, believing that his way of life had barred him access to a heavenly afterlife anyway.

  But the most exceptional case to Miguel was a frazzled and scrawny South American girl aged only sixteen, who screamed at him in a foreign language when he tried to pull her and her child away from a busload of trapped senior citizens. She was intent on opening the buckled door to let them all out, but Miguel pulled her back anyway, knowing that it was seconds away from exploding, and that everyone on board not only loved God and would get to Heaven, but had lived their human lives and were ready for their end.

  ‘Come with me, before Satan feels your loathing towards God and steals your soul!’ he cried, terrified beyond measure that her hysteria would certainly trigger Satan’s notice. He wanted the dark temptress to come to him of course, but not while this girl was within reach of her, and her child too! And because he still hadn’t found the person calling out to him with a weakening spirit, he started to worry that it was a Nephilim illusion of sorts that was leading him into a trap.

  But the girl cried that Satan had already come to her but she had scared her away from her child, Rosa. Then she said that her life had forced her into becoming a prostitute at the age of thirteen, and a mother too, so God would not want her anyway.

  ‘Let me stay and be a mother, as both God and Satan decided that I must be!’ she screamed. ‘I will enter purgatory after, and deal with that as well as I have this mortal life without YOUR help!’ Miguel yanked her back at the last moment as the bus exploded, and earned himself a slap for his trouble that made him smile for the first time in years. She had Satan’s temper, but God’s bravery, which sort of made her more powerful and intimidating than any angel or Nephilim that he had ever met and now that he’d met her and saved her, he was ready to leave Los Angeles. He hadn’t found the person calling his name but the voice had silenced and that told Miguel that it was already too late to save the person and prayed that they had loved God enough to get to Heaven on their own.

  Gabriella screamed when Miguel lifted her and Rosa up in his arms and took flight, but he did not let her go to damn herself or her child. He flew north with her until he found a place where she would be safe- a place where the radiation from Seattle’s obliteration would not be carried on the raging westerly winds, and a place so elevated that the rising ocean would not drown it. A place that was close to a forest that had not been burned, and where a river with burst banks sped
by so rapidly that it was pouring over the edge of the cliff and into the tide below, coming from one of the few places left on earth where the water was still unpolluted. He deposited Gabriella and her child there, and then started going back for the other brave survivors. In the end, he had eleven, and a whole lot of ruckus! The souls he had saved were furious with him, but it wasn’t until Miguel touched Raoul’s dead lover’s forehead, that they all hushed enough to listen.

  ‘He is gay, like me,’ Raoul sobbed. ‘Emilio always tried to go to church but they wouldn’t let him in because of me, so if what you say is true, then Satan has already claimed him!’

  But Miguel smiled and fingered the medallion around Emilo’s neck. Engraved into it was an image of an angel wrestling a dragon. ‘That is me, or a version of me as Saint Michael,’ he said, showing it to Raoul. ‘Your lover is the one who called me here, and if he has been dead for days as you said, then his faith and love for God was strong enough to get me to you even after his body had given up. So rest assured- he is in Heaven now, waiting for you to join him.’

  Raoul wiped at his eyes. ‘Are you saying it’s all true?’

  ‘I am saying that there is a God, and he loves you all equally, regardless of how you lived,’ Miguel ran his hands over Emilio’s body, and the corpse vanished from sight, eliciting a gasp from the others. ‘But almost none of anything else you have ever heard is true, and it is Satan who he is angry with, not the people that she tried to turn against him. Anyone who has room for God in their hearts will end up safe in Heaven, after this form of purgatory is over.’

  ‘I love this planet,’ the scientist, Maryah whispered unhappily. ‘If he loved us, he would never take it from us.’

  ‘He isn’t taking anything that he won’t return to you tenfold,’ Miguel assured her, but barely any of them look comforted.

  Raoul was the exception. He was so grateful to learn that God’s love could be extended to him despite his sexual preference, that he dropped to Miguel’s feet and gave his own love right then and there, but even though Miguel could have given him the touch and sent him to Heaven immediately, he hesitated and looked around to assess his beautiful surroundings, and the group of survivors who were now sharing it. They were sinners by their own definition, but heroes by their actions, and though the world was falling apart around them, Gabriella picked up a flower from the grass and leaned down so that her daughter could inhale the fragrance.

  ‘It’s beautiful, mummy,’ Rosa whispered, touching the petals. ‘Why would God want to ruin them by ripping apart the earth?’

  ‘To stop us from ruining it first,’ Gabriella whispered.

  ‘But I never pick flowers,’ the little girl said. ‘I wait for them to fall.’

  ‘That does not matter,’ her mother said, giving Miguel a murderous look. ‘Others have and so, we must now atone for that. All we can do now, is enjoy it while we are still here and ask ourselves if we can love God more than we love ourselves, or each other.’

  ‘Are there flowers in Heaven?’ the girl asked him, and all of the faces turned to Miguel who looked away.

  ‘There is no need for such things…’ he answered softly. ‘What you feel when you scent and touch one is just… there.’

  ‘Oh,’ the girl said, but she didn’t look any more convinced than he felt, and Miguel was thunderstruck by this exchange. Stopping to smell the roses was a common phrase, but Miguel realised that for all of Heaven’s glory, he had not done so for thousands of years, and he began to cry, knowing that God probably had not either. Only the angels who left paradise to spend time on the earth seemed to value it when they returned. Miguel- who had been lost in a loving, oblivious embrace of his daughter’s spirit for thousands of years- felt nothing there now. No sorrow no, but… nothing.

  It’s not nothing, and you must curb these betraying thoughts! Heaven is everything! If that is now beyond compare to you, then it is you who is nothing!

  Every one of these humans was exceptional to Miguel, but they were weary and angry and hungry and the north was rapidly freezing over, ensuring that an ice age would start before God ended it all. They’d all be better off in Heaven and now it seemed like they believed enough to be willing to go, and yet Miguel was compelled to keep them alive long enough for them to meet God as they were, and show him how despite all of their flaws, they were still capable of love and prepared to fight for their lives on a dying planet.

  Perhaps, God could make them Soul Mates like me! Satan has many, and look how they fortified her! Maybe when this world is over, God can start a new one, the right way!

  Then and there, Miguel decided to abandon his plans to find Satan until he had recuperated and healed his frayed wings, and settled with his survivors for a while, ensuring that they all had food, shelter and knowledge of what God was really like. He told them stories of Eden and Barachiel and Heaven by night, and they told him their own stories after, and eventually, he began to think of them as friends and they began to love God through him. During the days, he rested, waking only to intercept whatever crisis emerged, or to melt away the frost slowly creeping across the land from the north, and once a few months had passed and snow had started to fall in the middle of what should have been a warm fall afternoon, Miguel knew that the world was dying, and that he had fallen in love with the prostitute Gabriella, and her daughter.

  They were nothing like Satan, Neveah, Heaven or Hell, but they were extraordinary to him for the strength of their will in the absence of power or privilege. They’d come from nothing but shared everything, and though they were relatively plain and weak to look at, they were funny and kind and bright and glowed with everything that was good in the world. When Miguel touched Gabriella’s scarred cheek for the first time without her striking him for it, he felt a soul almost as bright as Heaven’s, and a desire that shook him to the very core, and when she grew round with his child, he closed his eyes and farewelled Satan and God in the one prayer- he would not cry out for either of them again now that he had all any man could ever need, and he would not return to Heaven while his life was so blessed on Earth. He began erecting her a stone cottage while she planted a garden around it and together, they named it Eden.

  ‘We will die here,’ Miguel whispered to his love as she plucked strawberries from a vine. ‘And soon. You know that, yes?’

  It was so cold that her breath decorated her words with misty clouds. She smiled at him and popped a strawberry into his mouth, looking prettier than she ever had in the glow of his love. ‘So long as we live here first.’

  Everyone’s needs were catered to in Eden, so though no two individuals were alike in appearance or power or worth, they never fought over anything but what was best for them all. Everyone had a strength, and that strength gave them purpose and served them as a community. Amalie would run to look for survivors, Gabriella would sing with an old guitar to entertain them at night, others would build and as the group expanded, so did their tasks. It was like back in the beginning only this time, the people alive were too grateful for their existence to despair over what they did not have, for they’d known what having nothing was.

  Miguel loved them all equally, but gave only his heart to Gabriella, and when his son was born, he named him Elijah. The name had two meanings- a harbinger who would come before the lord, and after the Pagan sky God, for when Elijah laughed for the first time, the clouds broke and for just one moment, sun shone through on the beautiful Nephilim boy and melted more of the snow.

  Satan saw this while she was admiring the smoky, heavy skies and unfurled her wings, taking flight and following the light, thinking that only God could pierce such blackness with his golden aura- and that putting that light out was the only chance that the human race had left.

  God had made the world, then he had changed it and now that he was disappointed with it and didn’t want it anymore, he had started to destroy it. But Satan wanted the world still- very much- if she could trick God into abandoning it before he vanquished it, it w
ould be hers for the taking.

  PART ONE

  1.

  Sneaking into the upper level of the north wing wasn’t the most inspired or well thought out plan that I’d ever had before in my life, so when the handle on the entry turned easily for me, I didn’t know whether I’d struck it lucky, or if I was about to be struck by King Elijah The Second’s lightning. Still, I needed to get in there and the unlocked door made that easier, so I inhaled quickly and let myself in, pausing to scan the silent room before I dared ease the door shut behind me.

  Oh boy oh boy… what’s the punishment for breaking in here again? A week locked in my room? Huh… that’s not so bad, unless I get whipped first!

  The foyer was as cloaked in silence as it was luxury- the king of silence that suggested abandonment without so much the settling of furniture or echo of clattering cutlery, so after lingering by the door and eyeing off the salt and pepper bearskin rug on the floor as though it were a guard dog apt to bite me for a full moment, I exhaled lightly and crossed though the foyer and into the next room, clutching my book and the precious photocopies within it to my chest as I scanned the room for signs of danger.

  Wow okay, so this was not what I expected...

  I had tiptoed directly into what had to be the main living quarters for the royal family, and was not only thrilled to see it had been completely abandoned, but shocked to see that it was nothing like the rest of the castle. There were no dark corridors, no heavy stone furniture; everything was light and open and almost rustic in design, from the white timber table with its spray of spring-bright blooms on the centre of it, to the fireplace, which was as wide as three of the one in my own room (which I had not yet lit) and topped with a mantel carved in the shape of a white mermaid streaming across a wave on one side, and an angel taking flight on the other so that both figures curled up on the ends as though stretching for heaven. It was gorgeous, and the array of framed photographs arranged across the top of it were touching, and begged me to stop and examine them. They were all family shots: Constance between Elijah and his younger brother Ewan on their Joining day, Karol as a youth looking so much like Kohén now that I had to look twice, the duchess with both new-borns in her arms and most moving of all- a picture of the ten-year old twins on the sands of Caldera, grinning at me as if to say: ‘Play ball?’