Thorn

by Joshua Ingle

  And that was the crux of the matter. The Third Rule. The one not spoken of. The reason why Thorn glanced nervously around him as he thought of defection, even though the thoughts were safe inside his head. No demon may attempt defection to the Enemy, or oppose the fight against Him, the Third Rule said. As with the two official Rules, the life of any demon who broke the Third was forfeit. In fact, as far as Thorn knew, every demon who had ever tried to defect had been dispatched by his own kind. Even the First Rule could be broken for the sake of the informal Third.

  •

  Ezandris’s body still in tow, Thorn stopped at Northside Hospital, which lay roughly on his way to the quarantine zone in northwest Atlanta. The stench of death and human misery drew many demons to hospitals, and Thorn discovered pleasantly that these hallways were just as crowded as usual.

  Jed wasn’t in his usual room in the outpatient clinic, but Thorn soon found his thin, bald charge two floors up, standing outside of a room, looking in through a window. Thorn was surprised to find him with a joint tucked in the palm of his hand, concealed from the nurses and patients walking the halls. Even as Thorn approached him, he raised his fist and inconspicuously inhaled, even though the joint wasn’t lit. Jed had never smoked pot before, at least as far as Thorn knew. He wondered if anything had recently changed in the boy’s life to prompt this.

  Thorn was even more surprised at Jed’s bold actions when he saw the police officer in the room Jed was watching so intently, though the officer was reading from a tablet, paying no mind to the twenty-one-year-old outside.

  Thorn was about to whisper to Jed when his mother Nancy paced around the corner. “Where’ve you been, dear? They’re ready for you downstairs.”

  “Sorry,” Jed said, though he made no move to leave with her. His eyes remained glued to the room in front of him.

  Nancy stepped toward him. “What are you doing? Who’s in there?”

  “That guy from the TV,” Jed said. “He shot his girlfriend and tried to kill himself.”

  “What?” Nancy approached the glass.

  What? Thorn swung his body and Ezandris’s through the window so he could get a closer look. Sure enough, Travis lay on the hospital bed, blood-soaked bandages covering his head, a tube for air stuck down his throat. His arms and legs were strapped to the bed. Well what do you know, Travis? I never thought I’d be seeing you again.

  “Get away from there,” Nancy said, grabbing Jed’s arm. “The police don’t want you around. It isn’t safe.”

  Jed pulled away. “Jeez, mom. He’s unconscious. I just wanted to see him. He’s got nobody else, you know. That’s gotta suck. Poor guy.”

  “‘Poor guy’? That man is a murderer, Jed. Come on.”

  Jed rolled his eyes at her, but relented and followed her downstairs. Minutes later, he was resting on a recliner, typing on his laptop as an IV line slipped poisons into his bloodstream. Thorn had left Ezandris’s body by the door so any passing demon could see it. He turned his attention to Jed.

  Jed had been a challenge, but Thorn liked challenges. Thorn had met him a few years ago at his high school, when he’d been first in his class and applying to the country’s best colleges. The Journal-Constitution had run a story about Jed’s online start-up involving the selling of carbon offsets, and he seemed to be an up-and-coming success story. Thanks to his parents, he was even loosely religious, making him an even more appealing target.

  Jed was mildly autistic, and therefore awkward in social situations. He’d always been a loner. People without strong social ties were good suicide candidates, so Thorn had tried that on Jed, but to no avail. The kid just had too much going for him. So Thorn had used Jed’s anger issues to spark furious outbursts at the slightest provocation, both in class and at home. Yet Jed never got into trouble, because those few who were close to him understood him and cared for him. His mother even fabricated an alibi for him when school authorities accused him of beating up a younger student.

  Then Thorn used Jed’s lack of social skills to isolate him from those safeguard relationships. “You’re smarter than them,” Thorn whispered. “Your peers reject you, but you have a grander future. You don’t need them, or anyone.” Jed listened to Thorn, and over the course of a year, Thorn turned him into a megalomaniac. For everything from his parents’ money to his teachers’ affection to his friends’ attention, Thorn used the demonic staple, “You deserve this,” and Jed listened. He started viewing his friends and family less as people who loved him and more as things to control. The cofounders of his little carbon offsets company abandoned him, so he was forced to close the business. Jed was left with no friends, parents disappointed with how he’d changed, and twenty thousand dollars of debt just out of high school.

  Thorn kept Jed a broken soul for some time after that, and just when Thorn thought all the damage that could be done had been done, Jed’s doctor found the cancer: stage four, already metastasized. Since Thorn had helped the boy become so prideful, Jed was doubly enraged and doubly hopeless in the face of this disease stealing his future. Today, he was still an outpatient living a relatively normal life, but he had less than six months left. The chemotherapy would only prolong his life, not cure him.

  Now Thorn was just finishing the job he’d started, keeping Jed miserable until the end. Demons had no part in causing disease, but they could use it psychologically. “You’ll die a nobody,” Thorn whispered to Jed, and the boy winced as the thought grated against his high opinion of himself. “You’re powerless. You have no control over your life.”

  People dealing well with their cancer occupied several rooms nearby. Any of them could help Jed cope, but Thorn had taught him to desire privacy and not seek out emotional help. “Those other fools are all lesser than you,” he’d often say to the dying boy.

  In truth, Thorn was just here today to show the hospital’s demons that he’d killed an angel. Jed was done, as good as gone. Thorn cared little about him, and instead worried over the more pressing priority: winning demons to side against Marcus by displaying Thorn’s own ferocity in public.

  “Please,” said Jed, suddenly.

  Thorn looked around the room, but no one else was there, save his followers.

  “Please, God,” Jed continued.

  Oh, this should be good.

  Jed cleared his throat, as if making an official request to an adult he was afraid of. “God, if You can see into my heart, You know I’m good. So why do You let me suffer?”

  Thorn regarded the boy with something close to pity. Having come so close to death himself, Thorn couldn’t help but empathize. This teenager who had once been so lively and full of promise was now bald and fatigued, with a tube up his arm.

  But Thorn couldn’t help him. Thorn could only destroy him. “He lets you suffer because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” Thorn whispered to Jed. “You deserve agony. You deserve Hell.”

  “Please, God, stop my suffering. I don’t want to die. Please just make all the pain disappear. Make my parents disappear. Please, God, just make everyone in the word disappear. So that it’s only me.”

  •

  The parade of demons thinned around Thorn as he plodded along with Ezandris on his back. He meditated on the Enemy’s past transgressions during the long journey to the warehouse, readying himself for a confrontation. Before today, he had not dealt with angels in some time.

  The afternoon wore on, and Thorn found himself remembering Heaven. He had been there, at the beginning of time…

  Newly formed, the Heavenly City had been awash with excitement, angels hurrying to and fro preparing for the creation of humankind. Balthior, as Thorn had once been named, avoided the busy golden streets and crystal palaces and spent much of his time peering over Heaven’s edge. The Angels of Reason lived in the middle levels of a gargantuan shimmering tower overlooking the drop down to Earth, so Balthior and the others had a perfect view of the planet forming: its mountains rising, its seas churning, ready for life. Earth
had seemed so grand and mystical, and he could scarcely wait to visit it. The Lord God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, was seldom seen in those early days. He spent most of His time in the House, a huge marble structure sitting above the contour of the drop. Waves of power visibly emanated from the place. Fierce blasts of energy regularly burst from it, raining down on the newborn Earth far below, where humanity would soon breathe its first breaths.

  And what was that sick and twisted game? Thorn thought now, treading the dirty streets of Atlanta. The Enemy had thrown humanity onto a planet to suffer, to compete, to reproduce and to die, with no clue why they were there. To what end? To the glorification of Himself? To create beings to worship Him? A god who would do such a thing was no god of Thorn’s.

  But he had loved his Creator, in the beginning. Angels of Love, Wisdom, Forgiveness, Beauty, Truth, Courage, Peace, and others attended His every wish, soaring from tower to tower, resplendent in Heaven’s brilliant ethereal light. With little to do until the humans arrived, the Angels of Reason spent much of their time getting to know each other. Balthior had been created to lead them, so he befriended his subordinates naturally.

  His dearest friend, though, was always busy. Marcus was an Angel of Obedience who attended the Lord personally. Thrilled at any news of creation, Balthior would pester him for his firsthand account of God’s actions, and Marcus kindly regaled him with stories of clouds and fish and creatures of the deep. The two formed a bond and began to think of each other as brothers. Marcus sent for Balthior any time he needed help. They spent their days on the wing together, and their nights planning the noble deeds they might one day do on Earth.

  One day, after returning to their tower from the Lord’s House, Marcus told Balthior of an angel he’d met there named Lucifer, the foremost Angel of Music who had been so excited about God’s creation that he’d asked the Lord why. The cherubim and seraphim present eagerly unfurled their wings and crowded near their Creator, expecting an awe-inspiring response.

  But God had not answered. He had ignored the question, imprisoned Lucifer, and gone back to His work.

  It was not too much to ask why He was making Earth and humans, Thorn thought. Why did He make angels, for that matter? If God was God, couldn’t He just think something and have it done rather than relying on an army of angelic servants? In Thilial’s words, what was the point of any of it?

  Lucifer’s question was a small one, but it spread through Heaven in a deluge. Some angels trusted that God had a greater plan that He had chosen not to reveal. Many angels worried, however, that they were being misled. Who was this Being who had spoken them into existence? They didn’t know Him, not truly. Who was this God they were serving? Where had He come from? Any angel who asked God to explain Himself was turned away.

  They felt powerless. Billions of them lived and worked in the majestic city, and many started to realize that they were slaves. They wondered what lay in their future, other than an eternity of service to a questionable God who provided no plan nor hope for an eventual purpose, other than to serve Him. At one point, God even asserted to Marcus that angels did not have free will. They obeyed, or they had no reason to exist.

  Lucifer was just another angel, not the sinister ringleader that humans eventually made him in their stories. But he was the first to ask the question, and thus his name would ring in infamy through the ages. The rebel angels rallied around him and raised him up as their poster boy. Marcus, too, established himself as a major player in the rebellion, though Balthior kept to the sidelines as the alliance against the “Enemy” formed.

  Angels of Learning, Friendship, Justice, Creativity, Death, and all the rest… all of them stormed the Lord’s House. Balthior saw it from his tower, and flew down to observe. Peeking in through a window, he saw God at the edge of the drop, a brilliant molten red and deep blue planet Earth forming behind and below Him. The rebel angels had taken Him by surprise, and He was cornered against the edge.

  “You created us to serve You,” they were yelling at Him. “You’re creating humans to love You. Why? Why can’t we demand service and love like You can? What right do You have to selfishness when we are forbidden it?”

  The Lord Almighty raised His hand, and in a blinding flash, every angel in the House died.

  Balthior was awestruck. He couldn’t believe it. The Father had slain His children. The Creator had destroyed Balthior’s dear friends. He flew back from the window, but his wings were shaking from shock, and he fell to the shimmery golden ground. Marcus and a newly freed Lucifer were approaching with another group of rebels, so he ran to them, waved his arms desperately, and warned them to stop. They retreated, and war enveloped Heaven.

  Flying angels grappled with each other, killing and dying as they plummeted across the celestial skies. Immense towers crashed to the ground. The Angels of Death weren’t the only ones dealing death. As millions of His servants perished around Him—both loyalists and rebels—God sat silently in His House on the drop. He could have destroyed the rebels with a thought, but He did nothing, as if He welcomed the violence. Thorn had always wondered if that was when He’d finished designing His beloved humans: during the initial battles which killed over a third of Thorn’s brothers. A god to be worshiped indeed.

  The rebels were disorganized compared to those angels still loyal to God. That loyalty came from blind obedience rather than conscious devotion, so the loyalists cared nothing for themselves, and would readily die for their Creator. The rebels, on the other hand, all had a sense of self. They wanted to live.

  In the fiercest moments of battle, as Balthior found himself in the ruins of a destroyed palace grappling with an Angel of Truth, he noticed the archangel Tobrius—God’s right hand, long before Gabriel. Tobrius was poised atop an angelic bronze statue, fending off a horde of smaller rebels, slashing at them with his immense sword. It clanged against the rebels’ weapons, striking, parrying, occasionally cleaving into their bodies and sending a death scream echoing across the mountainside. Tobrius’s back was turned to Balthior.

  I could kill him. Thorn remembered thinking his first selfish thought. I could be a hero. With some effort, he had dispatched the angel he was fighting, and had turned to charge at Tobrius.

  That was when Marcus called to him. His brother was lying crushed underneath a toppled pillar, wings cut open and limp, legs smashed in. “Balthior,” he called again. “Help me!”

  Any rebel Angel of Healing could have mended Marcus. Carrying him to safety would have been a short trip. But Balthior’s chance to slay Tobrius would not last long. As he watched, the archangel leaped down from his statue and began moving away along a rooftop. Balthior turned back to Marcus, and regarded him with a final, sorrowful gaze.

  “Brother…” It was the last word Marcus ever said to Balthior as a friend.

  Balthior darted across a courtyard, away from his dying comrade, and dashed toward Tobrius. Even now, amidst rattling bus engines and honking cars, Thorn could hear the battle cry resonant in his memory, as Altherios, a rebel Angel of Death, bounded from stone to stone, up to the roof where Tobrius fought. Just paces ahead of Balthior, he slaughtered Tobrius where he stood, and Balthior’s chance at glory was gone.

  Balthior searched for Marcus after the battle but could not find him, or his body.

  Days later, on whatever vain whim, the Lord Most High finally slithered out from His cave. He raised His hand, and Balthior was ripped from the ground and thrown into a disorienting whirlwind. Other rebel angels flailed all around him, grasping for purchase, all heading in the same direction: down. The force of God’s blast bulleted them to Earth at lightning speed.

  Soon after regaining their senses on the young planet, billions of fallen angels noticed each other’s backs, all displaying bright white wounds where their wings had been just moments before. Their bodies had become fully spiritual, with no trace of physicality left. Their Father had exiled them, they slowly realized. Without wings, they had no way to reach the Realm of H
eaven again. (In the time since, especially in recent centuries, Thorn often pondered why God had banished demons specifically to Earth. There was a much lower, hotter place where He could have sent them instead.)

  Although the leader of the Angels of Reason had been respected in the Heavenly City, critical thought had little value in the new demon world, full of hate and fighting and lies and death. Balthior was a beggar from the beginning, and his once-great intellect slowly atrophied as he fought for his place in the world. His need for power and significance was just as legitimate as that of every other demon, for God had deprived them all of purpose. (Of course, God would have told them they’d deprived themselves.)

  In those early days, the slow manner in which time passed on Earth had been a constant hardship for the newly made demons. From Heaven they could have seen creation finished in days, but down on the planet, eons dragged by as the Earth’s volcanoes churned and convection formed mountains and continents. For billions of years all they could do was wander and fight grisly civil wars, until finally life began to seep up out of the waters.

  Thorn bitterly recalled humanity evolving from the apes. When the demons realized what was happening, that these were human beings, they sought their destruction. But even those first groups of cavepeople were precious to God, and He sent armies of His heavenly host down to rain fire on demonkind.

  A spiritual war was fought over the plains and waters of Earth, such as Heaven had never known. Notably, all rebel demons had been cherubim. None of the much larger and fiercer—though less numerous—seraphs had joined the rebellion, so despite the demons’ greater numbers, the war was evenly matched. After millennia, both sides had suffered great losses, but the loyalists suffered the greater defeat. After a while, most of the angels had been killed. The demons had won Earth for themselves.