It did not feel like a coincidence that Morningstar had been there the day before. That Zadkiel had been searching for him, or that Iofiel had been seen there.
It was another week, still, before Iofiel felt awake again. She’d gotten back to eating, sleeping, being near mortal. But the University still wasn’t quite right. It’d never been a lively place, but now angels and demons shuffled to their classes, avoiding each other with only tiredness. Meals were quieter, less populated.
There was a meeting past Halloween, on November third.
They gathered in the quarry for it again, this time in the pouring rain. A spell was put over the place without care of concealment, and the raindrops bounced off a high, dry dome, clattering like a tide of pebbles determined to pop their bubble.
The students gathered first, as before, but it was quiet. No one was openly practicing spells, and only a few whispers bounced off the slate walls. When Adramelek and Amariah entered, it was a somber affair. No chanting, or wild laughter.
Amariah rested in Adramelek’s hands, and Iofiel realized she was likely the one holding all of the illusion spells together. Her form, ever glittery, was a duller shade of yellow. Adramelek sat down, casting himself a small ice float like before to rest on. This time, however, he didn’t watch down from particularly high up. Iofiel could barely see him from her position in the crowd.
“This could be nothing,” he said, his voice echoing more than last time, bouncing off the rain-dome. “Staff here at the University... we are not fully informed as to the plans of the day, seeing as we work so close to our enemies. But I have heard no reason to fear, and neither should you. Things will continue as usual. Despite the destruction, we will remain.”
Amariah rolled onto his knee, and cooed in Angelic, “Yes,” very softly.
“Yes,” Adramelek said. “If one of us leaves, the other will follow. I know— Hm, I suppose I know that the lives of angels are worth more than demons. If any frightful end is at hand, they will not be abandoned, and thus neither will you.”
“Yes,” Amariah said again.
Adramelek appeared troubled, looking to the ground and kicking his legs. His dark wings were messy. “We’ll have to come up with a new false name, but if there’s one thing I’ve heard, it’s that we needn’t be so careful, these days. A few years more at most,” He stood up slowly, still on the ice platform, “But probably not now.”
Iofiel realized he was looking towards her as he said this, realized that someone she once had mildly feared now was scared of her. She knew things, big things, things that likely only the Archangels knew—
She’d lied once before. She’d lied a lot, actually, and as she slowly raised her hand into the air she thought back. Lying wasn’t right for an angel, it was something they didn’t do— but in her pocket was a bar of peppermint soap, and she had never been all that good of an angel to begin with.
Of course some had already been glancing her way. She stepped into the aisle, her hands shoved into her coat.
“Ah, friend,” Adramelek acknowledged her, though she wasn’t sure what he meant by that.
“Three years,” she said, looking to the left and to the right. “No promised day, but three years.”
“When you’ve graduated,” he said softly, “Thank you, angel.”
“You’re welcome, angel,” Iofiel said, not meeting his gaze. “But I wouldn’t trust me.”
“I don’t,” his wings were hanging loose behind him, but he began to fold them against his back, “But it’s good to know.” He stood up. “We like to know things, all of us. I suppose that’s what we have in common.”
“Continue,” Amariah squeaked.
“We will run until we know to stop.” Adramelek dismissed his ice platform, falling to the ground and landing without falter. He cradled Amariah in his arms delicately. “Maybe in three years, but certainly not tomorrow.”
He walked down the aisle, slipping past Iofiel. Once he’d left the quarry, the others slowly began to follow. Iofiel had earned her share of looks— some still dirty, others still fearful— but she was beginning to find herself not caring.
A few months, not years, and everything in the world would be as the city was.
Iofiel knew, and she’d always known, but suddenly it hit her: she didn’t want that. She didn’t like the apocalypse. Didn’t like what it meant.
Maalik lingered by her side for a few moments, but then brushed past, leaving her with a long look. She’d spotted Archie in the crowd for a few moments too, but that was a bridge she might’ve burned.
Better than a city.
Iofiel waited for the quarry to clear out, but it never did— waiting just on the edge of her vision was Salem. She had barely seen him since the class trip, and even that had been fleeting. Hadn’t spoken to him since his soccer game. It felt like ages ago, watching that first shooting star streak past.
“You look like a mess,” Salem said, once they were alone. “Look, I hope you don’t mind me talking to you.”
Iofiel shook her head, “I don’t know if you can tell, but I’ve been relentlessly not minding a lot of things lately that I should.”
“Uh, yeah.” Salem scratched his neck, “I never thanked you for that time you... took me home. I don’t remember it well, but it was nice. You were nice to me, and I didn’t really deserve it. So, thanks.” When Iofiel said nothing, he continued. “Look, is what you’re sayin’ true?”
“What have I been saying?”
“Well, everyone’s been saying you’re in deep with the prophecies and shit, so you know. Are we seriously going to be seeing the end in three years?”
Salem wasn’t necessarily high on her list of people she liked, but she wished she could’ve told him the truth. “Yeah. Pretty soon, huh?”
“Really.” He gulped. “Uh, do you think... do you think I could get away with running away?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Because you’re the weird one. Demons... We’re all the same too, you know. When you do demon stuff, it’s strange but occult, mildly threatenin’. If a demon tried angel stuff, he’d be killed. We just... we just kill people who don’t fit. Even if we’re running around fucking and smoking and drinking, we still have to be doing it right.”
“Do you want to run away to play soccer?”
“Yes!”
“That’s a bit underwhelming.”
“I know it is!” Salem said, “But if the world’s ending, who gives a shit?”
Iofiel bit her lip. “You could do it. I think we’re tracked while we’re on campus to a degree, probably by Amariah so a demon would stand out more. A rogue angel is easier to track down among humans, though, and Amariah is exhausted right now. You could easily sneak out and get lost in the chaos. I’ll help you.”
“Is it— is it really going to be simple?”
“No one cares about you, Salem.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Let’s make a deal.” Iofiel put her hand out, thinking ahead for once in her life. “I can’t tell you much, but there’s something I’ll need you to do. During break, on the class trip, I can get you a chance to escape. You’ll just have to do one thing for in return.”
“What?” Salem asked. He looked as shocked as she did by her forethought.
“I can’t quite tell you everything. You never know who might be listening,” Iofiel said, taking a deep breath of the cold autumn air. “But…”
24: Only Butterflies
THERE WAS A butterfly in her hair, and another on her shoulder, and one on her nose which kept blocking her vision with its great blue wings.
Not like what she saw was much better. Archangel Michael was as lovely as ever, somehow not sweating in the butterfly garden he called his home. He sat across from Iofiel in a small redwood gazebo, lit by physical patches of sunlight that wandered with the butterflies. A few lines of fairy-lights hung from the ceiling, but they gave off nearly no glow.
Plants of all sorts wove thei
r way through the ceiling beams and around the walls, and on the bench which Iofiel sat someone had scrawled ‘R+L, 2011’. The gazebo, and the small, hot garden it was in, felt too real to belong to the fuzz of Heaven. Perhaps Michael had stolen this place from somewhere on Earth, though Iofiel could not fathom why he would do this.
A few quails wandered the garden-room, which was in a foggy-glassed greenhouse. Various plants from around the world grew to wild success, and the footpaths around the gazebo appeared too overgrown to navigate.
She’d barely spoken since being summoned here, and was cautiously sipping tea from a black and gold teacup. Michael’s six eyes were closed, and he was resting his head on one of his hands. Yet to explain why she was needed.
Zadkiel was here, too, but he’d made even less of an impression, and was leaning outside the gazebo mostly out of sight.
“Is there something you need to talk to me about?” Iofiel asked, finally. A blue morpho landed on the rim of her teacup, and she gently moved it aside. Animals in Heaven were docile, sometimes too much so.
“How rude,” Michael said, still appearing asleep.
“Sorry, sir.”
He pushed himself upright, and slowly blinked through his eyes, one at a time. “Iofiel, beauty of all, I am thinking right now. Very hard, in fact.”
“Do I need to be here for it?” Iofiel stiffened. “Sir?” Somehow her manners had deserted her.
“You were with the humans that day. I’ve been sorting out so many things, been— and yet, there you were, among bookshelves, and with a witch.”
“The day before the meteor strike,” Iofiel said, very slowly.
“I have been so many things in the dead heat of time, Iofiel, but I have never been wrong.” Even with only his upper pair open, Michael’s golden gaze was relentless. A small transparent butterfly flew up to his face, and landed on his upper lip.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Since the beginning,” Michael said the gold on his cheeks far more beautiful than any of the insects clinging to his robes. “And I will be with the world until the very end. I know how doubt looks when it’s still in the bud. I have seen so many sway.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Lucifer was in the same area as you.”
“And?”
“Well. He is not dead.”
“Like I could kill him!” Iofiel said, half rolling her eyes before her caught herself. Damnit, why was being polite suddenly impossible? “I don’t think I saw Morningstar, but I wouldn’t know. I was in town trying to figure out how to summon him— maybe I was onto something? But I legitimately had no clue what was going on. And. I mean then, the meteor hit.”
“Maybe He was as displeased as I to see Lucifer in the sunlight,” Michael opened all his eyes, which was never a good sign. A green butterfly the size of a dinner plate fluttered over, landing on his head like barrette. He stood up, and it— along with the ones on his clothes and Iofiel— fled. “Tell me, are you to be trusted?”
“Yes, of course.”
He turned on his heel, his skin falling into blueness like a corpse in the Antarctic. “I don’t need to trust you. I need you to stay put.”
“Don’t you need to trust that I won’t betray you?”
“Ha!” Archangel Michael was perpetually gorgeous, but he was maybe a little less so when he was like this, unnatural and oddly committed to melodramatics. “If you try, I will kill you.”
“Wasn’t that the case before? Sir?”
Michael fell back into his chair. “I knew who you were, before. And why do you continue to call me ‘sir’?”
Iofiel tried to casually shrug, but found herself incredibly stiff. This was more natural anyway. “Those darn demons, I’d suppose.”
Michael took her right hand into his, easily engulfing it. With a small pinch, his black nails pressed against her skin, and row by row his eyes closed in concentration. She knew what he was doing the moment he drew blood, his slow singing piercing her ears like tinnitus. A bind, like the one she’d let Maalik place on her friends.
It was stronger than Maalik’s though, more complex. The terms, Iofiel realized, were a lot like a demonic soul contract. She was better at those than angelic ones now, so she couldn’t decipher exactly what Archangel Michael was forcing her to promise.
His terms sunk into her skin the moment he’d finished speaking them, a long mix up of black lettering that curled about her arm all the way up to her armpit. She couldn’t decipher a word of it, honestly, but it smelt of burnt rubber and felt like static.
“Do your job,” Archangel Michael said. “I don’t care if you’ve wavered or not. I— This is the way of the Lord, and you are a means to The End. Don’t be silly, Ioio.”
Iofiel looked at her newly textured arm. It wasn’t a tattoo, more like a brand, and the lettering was raised above her skin. “What will set it off?”
“Do your job,” Michael said, a golden dragonfly landing on his fingers. “And don’t force me into despair.”
Iofiel’s tea was still half full, but Zadkiel walked forward, and roughly took her by the arm, leading her away from the gazebo. Like Michael, his hair was blue, and he wore large hoop earrings. It was a popular style, imitating the chief Archangel: Archangel Camael was said to have shaved half her hair for this reason.
The butterfly garden was in Heaven, somewhere, but Iofiel had never been there before today— she’d woken up to a message on the floor, and been dragged here by Zadkiel without a word. She left in the same way, near where the doors of humid hall would’ve been, only to have Zadkiel tug her through the floor, through the world, and back to the University.
Zadkiel left immediately.
Iofiel was alone, and her arm hurt.
She needed to figure out what she was doing, needed to find Salem and say plans had changed, but even then she didn’t have much of a plan to begin with.
What she really should’ve done, honestly, was tell Archangel Michael there and then what he needed to know— the sigil, the methods needed— and left it at that. Let herself die, if that was needed.
Do her job, that is to say. But she didn’t. And she loved him, she loved him in every way, she basked in his presence in the same way she longed to bask again in the Sunlight, but—
A few weeks ago, now, when the meteor had hit—
Her arm hurt. So she spread her wings, and took off running.
It was rare she chose to fly this high, so far above humanity. The shells of the once-homes were more like accidental paint drops than dollhouses. The clouds were the size of her fingernail, soft modern sculptures. Humans saw shapes above them, divine messages in frustratingly inconsistent forms.
Iofiel saw rain vapor. She tried, briefly, hovering and staring.
She only saw clouds. She wished she didn’t. She really, really wished she didn’t.
Above her was a many mile long strip of cloud layer, and with a few easy flaps she hovered at the surface, her limp feet barely obscured in the smog. What she wanted— and perhaps this was a rare gift of free will— what she had always wanted was to sit on the clouds. Like a putti in a painting, her cheeks an angelic pink.
The incantation was hard, a little ahead of her, but she gathered the clouds and made, nearly, a platform of ice. She stood for a while, wings outstretched. The soft air magic that let her breathe up here also prevented her hair from billowing, but she eased it, slightly.
She hid her wings, her halo. She let herself weigh, let herself be seen.
For a moment, she was nothing more than a girl on a cloud, too high to be spotted, doing the impossible miles above a newly christened nowhere.
Then, in a mad fit of her abilities, she dashed across the ozone, each step barely landing on solid ice. She leapt and spun, her hair in her eyes. Each spell she was holding tugged through her flesh like too-tight ribbons, and when she was done she fell through the sky, back into holiness.
Iofiel flew back above to survey her w
ork. “Yes,” she’d written, sloppily and pale. You wouldn’t see it even ten feet up. The magic that held it together was starting to bristle, especially on her still sore arm, her messy spell casting already leading to cracks in the ice. It was right against her heartbeat, squeezing and shortening her breath.
Finally, she let go. It was gone in a blink.
In the great span of things, it’d existed as long, too.
25: On Santa Monica Pier
TIME LURCHED DILIGENTLY onwards. Iofiel wore long sleeves, and kept her head down. She said nothing else, really, and the world seemed to calm in response. The city was gone, the U.S. Presidential election had gone dastardly, and nearly everywhere else, bad things were still happening. But not to Iofiel, and not on any grand scale— just the sort of everyday disasters humanity had been putting up with for centuries. Another mass shooting, another civilian bombing.
Nowadays, it didn’t mean anything much.
November became December, the world became buried in snow. In another life, she would have wondered at the whiteness, chased the first flakes and buried herself in the earliest blizzard. But Iofiel did her classwork. Sometimes she’d see Santiago in the halls, and half-nod. She’d seen Damien in the library some days, lying on the floor and scribbling out a poem. Once or twice she’d had a full conversation with Archie.
It was still stilted, and she was still lonely, but only half. Angels didn’t have time to be lonely.
Maalik was still her friend, and she was still thankful for that. He listened to her ramble, brought her food, and once or twice held her hand while she cried. But he’d become increasingly consumed with his work. He’d taken up physical training courses as well with some of the other army soldiers, and often came back covered in cuts and bruises. He was a healer, not a fighter, but there was nothing that could sway him.
He didn’t talk, that much, and he was stiffer too. Everyone was, even as the fears regarding the apocalypse calmed. There was less griping about over-practicing simple spells, less worry when presented with something new. Suddenly Iofiel’s whole class of lazy demons who knew this year didn’t matter as much as the next two were studious. The approach of another class trip on the fifteenth was all anyone could talk about. Getting out into the human world again. Seeing if they could make it on one year instead of three.
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