Good Angel

by A. M. Blaushild

  “Y-Yeah,” Maalik offered.

  “Stay for a moment.” Her eyes flickered briefly, once up and then back to him, as if to acknowledge she wasn’t supposed to be asking this of him. She soared down suddenly, landing on the wall between Eden and the rest of Heaven. Maalik took a moment to join her, watching as several other angels followed her descent.

  He really had no idea who she was, but obviously something was of note. A Power, one of the bulky second sphere soldiers whose purpose was entirely military, landed a way away, wings still open. As if a bit cautious to be seen gathering like this at all.

  The sentiment was well founded. Angels were not all that restricted, but large unapproved assemblies had been frowned upon since the Fall, and certainly most if not all of the lot had other responsibilities they were supposed to be tending to.

  The Power slowly edged forward as the pink haired Archangel watched the skies. From here Heaven and Eden lay open like a storybook, somehow finite and infinite at the same time. The wall curved slightly as it circled Heaven, the smooth stone blinding in the sunlight, and it too looked endless as it faded into the mist.

  About twenty angels gathered total, though Maalik suspected an Ophanim, spinning in frantic circles about fifty feet below them, was listening in too.

  “Hey um, so.” Maalik was an Archangel— he outranked most of the crowd before him. He should have felt confidence in this, a sort of leaderly pride. But there was a good, simple reason he’d chosen the University over the natural choice to simply charge into battle.

  His stomach flipped. It’d been flipping and freezing for a while now, at least not as obvious a sign of his anxiety like his goddamn stutter.

  “W-W-What do you want to know?” He said, the start of his sentence successfully transformed by his nerves into an utter train wreck.

  “I spent some time at the Uni when I was your age,” the pink Archangel started. She gestured quite a bit when she spoke, her hands swaying as if gathering the attention of those around her into a compact ball close to her chest. “Archangel Michael seemed utterly, ah, madcap about something from the school today. And you might not know them well, but surely you’ve crossed paths with this Iofiel.”

  Maalik, plainly, did not like the way she said Iofiel’s name. “I’m a friend of hers,” he said, not without thinking. It was impossible for him to lie, no matter how much of him still was fighting for him to at least give it a shot. He was footsteps from Eden, approximately very near to the Sun right now. Like hell he was breaking any rules. “She’s actually my roommate.”

  “Oh!” The Archangel clapped twice, which seemed like an appropriate amount of clapping for the emotion she was trying to convey. “Do you know anything about what Archangel Michael was speaking about? He’s met with her before, and... well, I don’t mean to impose, but he did appear quite upset.”

  “He’s never upset,” Maalik said to this. In all his years— two— he’d never seen Archangel Michael act like that, his wings spread wide, his six eyes open. “Maybe it’s just the whole apocalypse thing.”

  “‘Thing’,” one of the angels, wrapped in so many scarves and layers only their grey eyes could be seen, tutted. “That University serves no purpose but to foul young angels’ vocabularies, I swear.”

  Maalik was impressed by how easily they had swatted off the implications of The End, but maybe they had a point about the bad influence of the educational system.

  None of the others seemed particularly hit either. Another angel said, with spit in their mouth: “And it encouraged fraternizing with demons.”

  “None of us pay the demons any mind.” Maalik cleared his throat. It was good to be speaking his native tongue again, a higher language full slick syllables and harsh vowels. After the comments from the other angel, however, he was currently stumbling through his native tongue like he’d never made these sounds before. “Sharing the facility is simply the best scenario we have in regard to the lack of training space left in Heaven, and its founding was fully supported by our Creator. We think.”

  “The kid is right, the Uni is a good thing,” The pink archangel said. “What’s your name by the way? I’m Barachiel.”

  “Maalik.”

  “Ooo, Maalik. What a destiny.” Barachiel clapped again. Maybe she just enjoyed clapping. “Regardless, Maalik, you’ve yet to say anything of substance, and some of us have responsibilities beyond essay writing!” She laughed a sort of ‘o ho ho ho’ type laugh at this.

  “...She’s my friend. And there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “But she’s done something wrong?” The Power asked from the back of the crowd.

  “She’s done—” He sighed. “Yes? Okay. She’s committed a couple wrong acts, and I suppose Archangel Michael is upset over this. But he also is the one who enabled her to do them.”

  “What?” one of the angels asked, a mix of incredulity and tension.

  “Archangel Michael,” he heard another utter, though he wasn’t sure what was meant by it.

  Maalik swallowed. One of the angels in the back looked up at a passing angel and leapt up, soaring away. Nothing would happen to them, but then, being an angel meant assuming anything could happen to them, and they’d deserve it if it did. “He’s let her do these… End Game things.”

  “Things,” that one angel scoffed again.

  “I don’t know. She’s not in any trouble, probably.”

  An Archangel jerked their wing towards the tower. “As I was leaving, I heard him say her name.”

  “Well,” His voice stuck on the word. “She’s a good angel, so it’s not going to be anything bad.”

  “That’s oversimplifying it, surely,” one of the angels said, rolling his eyes. He took off shortly after, part of the crowd quickly joining them.

  Barachiel was one of the last to go. She looked over Maalik once, very clearly taking in every inch of him. “I’d be more worried for her. For you too.”

  “I’m mostly just saying it’s going to be fine to console myself,” he explained. “I actually feel ready to throw up.”

  “You newbies are all turning out to be defective. Had one Guardian below me turn out to be a sinner. She was well, she was loyal. Found her charge pretty, fell in love. I tore her throat out this morning. I hope the next one is better.” Barachiel nodded. “Best you remember that before you make the accusation that anyone is good.”

  Iofiel flew to the ground. From this vantage point, Iofiel could recognize the floor mosaic as a brightly tiled image of Michael felling the Morningstar. A nice reminder to have going down.

  Most of the other Archangels had dissipated when the gathering had ended, but Gabriel followed her down. At the bottom, she landed with a stumble, and Michael caught her by the shoulder. At least he didn’t look mad, but then, Iofiel felt like if he did look angry at least she could anticipate what was coming next (I.E., a painful death). He actually seemed to show some concern for her, frowning slightly with only two of his eyes open.

  Nothing was dusty in Heaven, not even the dirt. The floor, an about forty foot dip below the sitting level, led to a bright white hall, at the end of which was roughly a sitting room. There were couches, and chairs, and what seemed to be a standard coffee table, but otherwise the decor was very unearthly. There wasn’t much, to be clear: several orbs of various colors and intensities hung along the wall and throughout the air. The walls were carved with sigils and lines completely unrecognizable to Iofiel, leaving no blank space.

  Michael sat on one of the couches, still looking formal even as he leaned back, his wings stretching far enough that his wingtips brushed either side of the room. Gabriel remained standing, but gestured that Iofiel should sit across from him.

  The armchair was bouncier than expected. “Hello, Archangel.”

  “Iofiel.” Though he flicked his wings again— a sudden shudder, up down, that made Iofiel jump in her seat— he still seemed calm. As she watched, the deep blue hue of his skin left him, melting off in thick patches
back into his skin, seemingly contained in the two dark blue tattoos he had on his upper arms. Some hidden spell, maybe? Almost immediately Archangel Michael was a tad more approachable. Certainly, a more reasonable shade of human. He brushed his teal hair with one hand, his eyes slow to meet hers.

  This was a good thing, still. His eyes were a pale and purposeful gold. “You may be my first horse.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh. Yes.” His clothes changed with the same ease as his appearance, his armor falling back into a single decorative plate below his cowl. His casual clothes failed to make him any less intimidating, though they did prompt Iofiel to wonder when the Archangels got so fashionable. And where they did their shopping— Michael’s red/gold jeans were absolutely not hand-sewn, or even particularly angelic.

  This train of thought kept Iofiel level headed, for a little while. “Isn’t that a role usually reserved for humanity?” Funnily enough, angels did come prepackaged with a rough knowledge of several holy books, a few not even canonical by their related religion. (Though of course, no holy book was truly canon to Heaven— beyond the general mantra of ‘the Creator is Good, the Creator created everything, evil Must Be Stopped, etc., etc.).

  “It is a role cast for the end.”

  “Okay, well...” Iofiel felt extraordinarily petty for not leaping to her feet in acceptance of her fate, but she had to take a moment. “Can I pass?”

  Archangel Michael blinked a few times. “You’re very silly.”

  “Oh. Uh.” Iofiel didn’t know how to interpret that. She let it sit, taking a second to glance up at Gabriel, who had a slight frown but was unreadable beyond this.

  “I have allowed you to exist freely for some time now.” A month, Iofiel thought sternly. “Instead of death, you have been allowed to fraternize with the demons, to learn the basics of their arcane arts. This has been against the natural way, and has made you an agent of chaos.”

  “Ah, try not to sound too stiff.” Gabriel leaned over the chair Iofiel was sitting in. He was roughly six ten, utterly dwarfing Iofiel and her seat. Michael seemed to take his advice.

  He leaned towards her, folding his wings back as much as he could and holding his head up with his hands, his golden fingernails perfectly matched to his freckles. “You’re a bit funny, you see. Angels haven’t gone out trying to study demon courses before, but we’ve had a few charming friendships. That I then send someone out to terminate, because we have standards. But Hell is winning on the Battlefield, Ioio. More than ever before.”

  “...So you need an insider?” Iofiel was leaning back as much as she could, squishing against the cushion and pressing her wing bones painfully into her back. She loved Archangel Michael with all her heart, every inch of his beautiful face and every tremor of his voice. She just wished he would back off a little, that’s all.

  “You fail to understand me.”

  “You haven’t explained the whole story yet, Mik,” Gabriel pointed out. This advice Michael took too, with a single thoughtful nod. If he had a flair for the overdramatic— the fact he was occasionally blue proved this— then Gabriel tended to be as underd ramatic as possible. His hair was brown with a slight curl, his clothes mostly a plain green. Iofiel could imagine he’d looked exactly the same for the last couple hundreds of years.

  “I need a horseman. I need the end. Hell cannot be allowed to win— surely, even with your off sense of purpose, you’re aware of this. They’ve been getting more souls lately, they’ve been winning at our eternal war. We need to flip the kill switch.” Michael leapt to his feet and immediately began to pace.

  “Isn’t that up to, uh...” It was common banter to use euphemisms; even in serious conversations ‘Creator’ was as far as she felt comfortable going. “...Mr. Tops?”

  “There’s nothing more divine than fulfilling divine will.” Michael kept twitching his wings, enough that Iofiel wondered if it was a tick he has no control over. “G-d is everywhere, everything. He knows all. So while it is not wrong to ponder if He would stop us, come any misdeeds, it is false. He knows. Everything is, always, according to plan. Even manually triggering the end.”

  “How do we benefit from... such a bad thing though? I mean the end is just that. Everyone dies. We... I-I don’t know what happens to us.”

  Michael seemed overwhelmed with thought, circling the sitting area with his wings dragging on the ground behind him. Gabriel answered instead. “Either paradise for eternity, our duty served, or a final death. Either ways, it is just.”

  “We don’t even know what the end is supposed to be like!”

  “If we force it properly, we’ll find out.” Gabriel had all his eyes closed, but Iofiel could still tell he was meeting her gaze, somehow.

  “So you want me to...”

  Michael jumped over the back of the couch and fell onto it, his yellow eyes draining to a pure white. “Be as you are.”

  “Huh.” Was that it? Was that are there was, all she needed to hear? Something deep in her eardrums seemed to rush a low tone, like static behind her eyes or the roar of a river inside her brain. She wanted to ask: Why call me out? Why let me know? Why speak to me at all?

  “If you fail, it’s not a big deal.” Ah, here were words Iofiel would’ve loved to hear in any other context. “Our current schedule has most of the end of days rolling out in a solid block, enough that humanity should get word around the same time Hell does. Round one is going to be light. The eclipse tomorrow is nothing, the red rains due for next week are easily dismissible... Our official end will be into the next human year, say, February? And we’ve scheduled the worst of it— plague, a notable political assassination, perhaps a bit of needless flooding— roughly a week before the date I’d like the world to cease.”

  “So what do I have to do...?” Iofiel said, “Is it really right to kill all those humans, even if it’s part of such a holy ritual?”

  “Most of them will be innocent, the children certainly will be. We could use the souls.” Michael pulled a small, too ordinary notepad from his pants pocket, and flipped through it. “Well, you’ve got a school break starting the seventeenth, so... perhaps I will speak to you again on the twentieth, when I know for certain.”

  “You don’t now?”

  Archangel Michael shrugged. A very simple, very real shrug. “Iofi, child, what matters is that you seep into everything you’re not meant to be in. You unhinge the universe, slightly. Do not tell the demons, do not warn the humans; show no mercy, for mercy belongs only to humanity. I may have you with me when the world ends. Perhaps your unholy magic will find a use then.”

  “Michael,” Gabriel said. Out of the corner of her eye, Iofiel could see one of Gabriel’s wings move.

  “You’re not human, Iofiel. We’re all going up to paradise.”

  Iofiel was still. Normally she breathed, but right now she couldn’t tell if she was, couldn’t feel if she had a heartbeat. “What... Can I please know? Why? I really only wanted to lend an imp some confidence, okay? I don’t know how this is all part of some plan, or why I can’t just go back and... do anything else but this. What do you really want from me?”

  “Fine. Iofiel, the only thing you’re meant for is what I make from you. You have some interest in demonology? Fine. Others have, and it has never hurt. I know a share of black magic myself. Fine. You know what you are? Irresistible.

  “We can fake the end forever, ruin humanity all we’d like. Be the ‘bad guys’ you so surely fear we are turning out to be. But the apocalypse will only be official when the beast is slain. You know what I am talking about, correct? We don’t know if the mark of the devil will manifest, if some creature of old will rise from the earth. But I do know I have to kill Lucifer.

  “I let him off easy last time, afraid to draw my first blood. His face carries no scars. When he dies, the world will be different in some vast way, and I believe that is when everything will click.”

  “I can see your apprehension,” Gabriel twirled into sight, kneeling on the
armrest of Iofiel’s chair, still far too tall for her comfort. “Many will die, yes. It seems wrong to force this, yes. But can you truly deny a world without the devil will be a better one?”

  “I know.” Iofiel’s eyes were wide, watery. She didn’t feel like crying, wasn’t sad. She wasn’t even anxious anymore. Didn’t even have feelings. Heaven was like this, a mess of being, where her form seemed ready to meld into the stone all around her, where Michael and Gabriel’s calm essences so easily spilled into her own thoughts. “You’re right.”

  “Do you know this?” Michael said. It wasn’t meant to be interpreted as anything other than a check for a touch of reaffirmation.

  “Yes.” She nodded twice.

  “Bring me Morningstar. Bring him out of Hell, and let me find him…” For a moment, Michael seemed caught on a thought, like his words had snagged on some invisible fence. “…There.”

  “We’ll sort out the details later,” Gabriel said, his eyes ever so slightly glancing at Michael, his mouth ever too tightly pulled flat.

  Michael smiled. “Let’s just say there will be no March.”

  PART III

  SUN-LIKE

  17: Bloody Ridiculous

  “YOU’RE GETTING DECENT at this.”

  “I know,” Iofiel said, half ticked her Rituals teacher had said anything at all. Her arms were covered in blood from the elbow down, and, though the spell she was trying to cast was mostly dependent on bloodshed and fresh sage, a degree of concentration was still required.

  She smeared the rabbit blood around her, glancing at a propped-up book to ensure she’d drawn the sigils right before finishing the loop. Then she read the Latin incantation, relieved to finally be onto the easiest part. The class was taking turns practicing ritual spells, and Archie had gone first today, seemingly to get him out of the way: though he’d picked a simple, large-scale scorching spell, he’d tripped up on the incantation for it, stumbling through the Yorubic verse several times. Other demons needed practice for spells too, but Archie seemed quicker to fluster at failure. Iofiel, preprogrammed with almost every human language, was still trying to help him perfect his linguistics— but he still frowned a little whenever she pulled her chants off without effort.