They watched a film together, some sort of short on the origin of the universe. “All media we use this semester will be created by humans,” the jaguar-headed professor explained. “There is no better way to understand them.”
The demon next to her was looking up at the screen, with his binder half open, but Iofiel spotted he was taking notes too. She got to staring at him again, somehow fascinated by him and when he noticed her, he returned that same poor glare.
Iofiel ignored the professors, now talking about the origins of humanity, from the planning stage to their actual evolution, and slid a bit closer to the demon.
“You’re an imp!” she whispered to him. She might’ve been wrong, but even as she thought of it, she became convinced: there were those who grew, and those, like her, who hadn’t.
“I’m — yeah.”
Demons were created differently from angels, made by weaker creators. Fallen angels, the original third who first rebelled against Heaven, had somehow learned the blood magic of creating life, but they couldn’t imbue their creations with knowledge, like angels were born with. So demons were created as children, or else part of a soul-selling deal with a human. They had to grow up and learn things for their own in order to have basic wisdom for everyday life.
Fallen angels could create life fully grown, though. Made in batches, usually numbered, and sent off to fight or work until death. Born adults, they only knew what few things could be given through magic. They were good at taking orders, fulfilling their purpose, and not much else.
They were called imps. This demon was one of them.
“How’d you get into the University?” Not like there was a test, Iofiel had only needed Amriel to pledge she was a kind, polished soul, and she was set. But an imp was extremely out of place here, clearly at an unfair disadvantage compared to the older demons.
“L-Leave me alone?” The imp moved farther from her, towards the end of the row, and Iofiel glanced around nervously before deciding it wasn’t worth getting any closer to the other demons.
She’d missed a lot. They were now well into a human video on early man, which the professors interrupted on occasion with corrections. At least she kind of knew this stuff: the many tests of their shared creator, trials seemingly without purpose. Just to see. Just to test how smart these new creatures were going to be.
The imp was desperately writing down notes in Infernal, and Iofiel suspected it was only through magic that he could speak in any other language. Imps didn’t need to, as they never went to Earth. But a ritual like that was surely too advanced for him. He must have had quite the patron.
Oh, there she was going again, distracted and missing another chunk of class. A packet was being handed out through the aisle, and before she could take a glance at it class was dismissed. The imp rushed away from her immediately, but then stood to the side as the demon half of the class filed out. Waiting.
Iofiel glanced back at the leaving angels, and made her way towards him, until she stood up next to him near the stream of demons. He jumped up when he noticed her, his black bat wings flaring for a second.
“What?” He was clearly demanding, but his voice was too frail for any sort of threat to exist.
“You’re an imp,” Iofiel said. “That’s ridiculous! Want to study together? I sort of missed everything.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Plus, you probably have a lot to learn about everything, and I can help you with that. Except the stuff I also don’t know.” She had blurted the idea to study together without any forethought. Maybe it was because he was an imp, not a full demon, but she didn’t fear him as much as the others. He was barely five feet tall, tiny compared to her.
She edged closer to him, but when he pressed himself against the wall defensively, she backed off. He was clearly terrified of her, and she was struck with pity for him. Better pity than empathy, she figured, better to patronize the enemy than care for them.
“What?” The imp took a step back. “I get beat up enough as is.”
“Well, we don’t do it in public then,” Iofiel offered, figuring she was surely friendly enough that his fear would fade.
Instead, the demon frowned, and groaned, “Go away.”
The crowd was finally thin enough for him to slip through, and for a moment Iofiel lost him in the throng. She followed the mass of demons out into the hall, heading towards their side of the building in pursuit. She was being pretty irrational, yeah, but she wanted to know more about him. An imp! At University! The pursuit of knowledge had never been popular among the divine, but a school seemed like the right kind of place for this kind of thing.
The imp had been fast walking, as had she, but at a certain point he looked back and started to run, and thus so did she.
“Hey! You don’t have to worry about me!” Iofiel called after him, but she wasn’t sure he heard. They weaved through the wide hall, nearly bumping into stray students, ignoring curses from those they nearly ran over. At the staircase, the imp paused before trying to run down it. Iofiel went through the same trial.
She watched him tumble down the steps, only to then slip and fall herself. She was a little closer to the bottom than he was, and stood up first, only a little dizzy.
The imp was lying face down on the mosaic floor of the third floor, his blood nicely complimenting the blue tiles. Iofiel leaned over him. It was just a nosebleed, but he lay like he was defeated.
“Did you push him?” a demon asked.
Iofiel shook her head. “I fell too. I think we might both be bad at staircases.” Or, Iofiel thought with guilt, I chased him. He fell because of me.
“Yeah. Frigging imps.” The demon, who had been leaning over with Iofiel, walked away at this remark. She hadn’t said ‘frigging’, of course, but rather a particularly bad word which Iofiel did not enjoy hearing.
“Are you okay?” Iofiel asked the imp, who was staring wide-eyed at the wall, not moving. But clearly alive. She wondered how the other demon had been able to tell he was an imp, despite how timid he came off as, there were no outward signs. Maybe everyone just knew him. It wasn’t like there were any other imps.
“Yes,” the imp groaned, still not moving.
“Sorry about that,” Iofiel said.
He didn’t respond.
“I’m just… curious. I didn’t know imps could come here, and none of the other demons like you, and I just feel kinda bad for you.” Iofiel was sitting on the floor next to him, whispering. They were attracting some passing stares, but no confrontations. “That’s a pretty bad nosebleed.”
“It’s fine.”
“Look, it’s my fault you fell. I guess I’m bad with impulses,” Iofiel said glumly, “But I’d like to help you. I’m not that old either. We could help each other.”
Quiet.
“Here,” Iofiel gently reached over and laced her hand with his, quivering a little at the odd sensation. Not a good thing for an angel to do, but a kind one. She held both of his hands, and then pulled him up with her. It was easier than expected, light and fast.
He wobbled a little, but seemed able to stand. His bloody nose began to drip onto his white shirt, and he wiped it on his sleeve.
“What’s your name?” Iofiel asked quietly. “Mine’s Iofiel.”
“Archie, okay?” he snapped, and then turned away, blood still dripping to the floor.
“You’re bleeding a lot.”
Archie had begun to walk away, but Iofiel followed. At least they weren’t running anymore.
“I’m fine. Please leave me alone.”
“It’s okay, really. Can I help you somehow? I just want to h—”
They turned the corner, and Iofiel spotted Maalik. He spotted her at about the same time, walking towards the two of them with broad steps. Archie stepped back with about the same amount of gusto.
“Who’s this?” he asked, flicking his eyes between the two of them.
Archie seemed like he was trying to say something, but nothin
g was coming out.
Maalik cornered Archie against the wall. “Was he bothering you?” he asked Iofiel.
“No, no, it’s okay. He does seem to have a broken nose, though. Can you fix it?”
Maalik stared at her with furrowed eyebrows, “I’m not going to. Shouldn’t you be at your next class?”
“Maybe. Still getting used to the concept of time.”
“Come on.” He led her away from Archie, back to two other angels who must have been his friends. “I’ll be right back,” he said to them. “Human Culture? It’s on the first floor.”
He took her straight to her next class without a word, clearly upset. “He really wasn’t bothering me,” Iofiel said as he left her outside the human culture classroom.
“That doesn’t matter. Listen, Blue. I really, really hope you weren’t bothering him, okay? Do you understand? You’re best off if you pretend demons don’t exist.”
Iofiel tried to heed his advice, trusting him to know these things, but, ten minutes into Culture, Archie walked in, and she couldn’t think of much else but who had let him come here in the first place.
3: Proper
HUMAN HISTORY and Human Culture were both every other day classes, while Rituals was only once or twice a week, alternating. When Iofiel had first received her schedule upon admission, she had thought all those blank days were going to drive her insane.
Now, she got it. It didn’t help that she was new to the whole concept of reading, the knowledge to understand it not helping with the actual act. It took her until midnight to finish her readings for Rituals, and she had a sincere feeling she hadn’t absorbed a word of it.
“It’s all about the chanting,” Maalik had assured her at one point, when she collapsed with a groan onto her bed, her book momentarily ignored. “Chanting is the most important part of a ritual spell, except in some cases where it doesn’t matter, and in fact it’s about the size of the paper used. Oh. And don’t forget texture.”
“What.”
“You’re a first year. Everyone does this class, everyone suffers until they don’t. Guardians don’t even need Rituals beyond the first semester. Trust me, by next year you’ll have forgotten everything.”
“Then why learn it?” Her voice was muffled by her pillow. Maalik, at the moment unseen, had been working on an assignment for the past few hour, flipping the thin pages of his Anatomy textbook and adding a bit to the sketch he’d been working on for a few hours now.
“Oh, dear, Blue. Have you become a cynic so fast?”
“The only classes that even matter to my major are the human studies, and even then I don’t see why I can’t skip straight to Human Integration 101 or whatever.” She sat up, and crawled back onto the floor. “I’m going to be reading these books until midnight tomorrow.”
Maalik whistled. “Wait until you learn what essays are.”
“I know what essays are, and I am afraid.” She stared at her book, her eyes narrowed at the ink of each word. “What happens if I don’t do any work? Or if I suck, and fail my classes?”
Maalik leaned back at his desk, catching Iofiel’s eyes. “Look, you’re a first year. You’re new to the world, with a bunch of classes nearly daily, not allowed to leave the campus... Everyone you see in this school has either gone through this and made it, or is doing the same thing you are. So why should you be any different in your success?”
“What does happen, though?” Iofiel asked, suddenly thinking of Archie.
“Don’t think about it too much,” Maalik said, and so Iofiel spent the rest of the night doing precisely that.
Iofiel was nine days old, but she was trying to act a little more mature and not think of that anymore. She was a student at a prestigious University. She was getting better at reading books. She was an angel —
She had spent the last four hours suffering through the remainder of her homework, and for someone who was only two hundred and thirteen hours old, that really meant something.
Maalik had needed to drag her out of their dorm that morning for breakfast, which they had again spent ruthlessly getting to know each other. For a decision she had had no part in making, she was quite pleased with her roommate. He seemed rather happy to know her too.
“What happened to your last roommate?” Iofiel had asked, eating something she didn’t quite know the origins of. It was brightly colored.
“Off,” Maalik had waved, like that was a suitable answer.
They were again sharing the far back table with Maalik’s friends, including another Archangel. All of them seemed to be third years, but they’d mostly avoided speaking to her. About halfway through breakfast, one did lean over towards Maalik.
“Are you free tonight?” he asked.
“What, second day of classes and you’re planning something?”
“Are you free?”
Maalik seemed to be internally debating this quite fiercely, his eyes a little tired. Then he looked at her. “Yeah. Come on, Io— You’ve yet to leave grounds, right?”
“First years aren’t allowed to without supervision,” Iofiel responded.
“You’ve yet to leave the Hub though, right? You know… Go outside?”
“The Hub?”
“The main building in the University. The dorms and most classes are all here, so it’s called that.”
“No.” Iofiel shook her head. “I mean, it’s really, really cold outside, but I’m about done with my homework. What’s going on?”
“We don’t talk about it here,” the other angel said with a grin.
Maalik rolled his eyes. “I’ll tell you back at the dorm.”
The other angel — white hair, gold eyes, and crooked but too-white teeth — leaned over the table. “Hey, by the way, what’s your name? We obviously haven’t met. I’m Shamsiel, light of day, pleased to meet you.”
“Oh. I didn’t know the last Shamsiel was dead.” Iofiel said, averting her eyes at the thought. It was the closest thing to a funeral prayer angels were allowed for each other. “Iofiel.”
“Can I just say, same back to you.”
“It feels like we’re all dying a lot faster these days,” Iofiel said, though this was only something she had knowledge of, not knew.
But it was true. Angels were only created to replace old ones, and it felt like there’d been a lot of newborns lately. Intelligence didn’t travel freely in Heaven, so all Iofiel knew was this, not how any of them were dying. Commonly, it was due to demons, but that usually was a fairly steady risk, an even percentage of deaths each year.
If the death rate was going up, that was, obviously, quite bad.
“Never a good sign, is it? Change. Except when the humans do it. As they get better at not killing each other, and inventing crazy things, we get worse at staying alive.”
“They’ve certainly been getting worse and worse at handling the planet’s health.” Maalik remarked, a bit bitter.
“Sure, but look at how long they’re living!” Iofiel interjected. “Well into the hundreds these days.”
Shamsiel leaned over and spoke in a harsh whisper. “Personally, I feel like they were meant to live ‘til thirty-five, and all this ‘science’ and ‘medicinal knowledge’ they’ve been conjuring in the last hundred years is straight up blasphemy to Our Dear Sunny Friend.”
“You’re joking,” Maalik said flatly. As a prospective Healer, he would have been relying on human knowledge for the last three years — angels had magic, of course, but their forms were human-shaped these days, and they’d never gotten around to figuring out the scientific process. Human textbooks tended to be pretty useful.
“Absolutely.” Shamsiel drummed his fingers on the table. He seemed particularly hyper, but not in the way that he might’ve been expecting something; more like he’d never known anything else. “Or not. But really, I sort of blame humanity. Maybe they’re on their way out, and these deaths are the tide shifting for the big End Game, you know?”
“Aw, I hope not,” Iofiel said. Sh
e felt nervous speaking between Maalik and him, like she didn’t know enough to participate in a discussion with the older angels. Though on this topic, they were all equally in the dark, as information like that didn’t flow freely in Heaven. “I’d like for that stuff to all go down after my lifetime. Though it does sound tremendously exciting.”
“It all sounds dreadfully trite, all those horns and declarations and curses we’d have to work through,” Maalik mumbled, “Of course, it probably isn’t going to be anything like in the Quran or Bible. Or any of the humans’ other holy texts. We barely had a hand in influencing those things, and while I don’t doubt someone up top put a few keys details in, humans like to embellish.”
“What, so you’re not counting on seas of blood and the whore of Babylon? We already have a few droughts going on, couple wars, and a whole lot of ‘withholding from charity’.” Shamsiel said. “Whatever. I’m just hoping I get to be the angel from Rev 10:9 who feeds a book to some prophet.”
“I think that’s something that happened in the past, not part of the prophecy. And besides, it’s a metaphor.”
“I hope when the apocalypse comes for real, Gabriel will descend from on high and give me a book to feed to some hapless chap, just so I can tell you to go frick yourself.”
Iofiel tried not to audibly gasp at his coarse language. It wasn’t a sin, but it sure was impolite, and this was the first time she’d heard an angel swear before. Somehow, she had just assumed none of them did.
Maalik scowled. “How much is it?”
“Just a fiver.”
The conversation had suddenly become meaningless to Iofiel, only getting context when Maalik reached into his jacket and pulled out a few bills of human currency. She wasn’t sure if it was against the rules to be trading, but she trusted Maalik to be doing something responsible. Shamsiel took the money and left the table after exchanging a hand slap with both Maalik and her.
Good Angel (Good Angel Duology Book 1) Page 3