***
Miriam Wallace had been a faithful member of the Catholic Church for as long as she could remember, which was at least eighty years on a good day. She was one of the most senior members of the congregation and had lived through nine priests. She attended Mass twice every week, and confessional nearly every week, even when her grumbling old bones didn't want to, and her annual donation to the choir was always appreciated. She had single-handedly kept the altar cloth and the priest's vestments in top condition for four decades and would have continued to do so had her eyes allowed. Her home was dimly lit and dusty; the shelves were cluttered with all manner of strange and wonderful objects that the neighborhood children (invited inside in for cookies and lemonade in the summer and cookies and hot chocolate in the winter) would stare at and imagine were mystical objects from other realms. In fact, most of these dust-catchers had some religious significance to Mrs. Wallace – a porcelain quail that had been given to her for First Communion, the strange gold-plate and crystal contraption that her late husband had brought home the day after their firstborn's christening. No cheap statues of enormous-eyed children here, nor tacky, light-up crucifixes. The only explicitly religious items in the house were a gold cross that she didn't wear anymore because her arthritic fingers couldn't manage the clasp and a modest, black-covered Bible which was buried under rubber bands and paper-clips in the junk drawer: The text was far too small for her to read these days, and she'd been putting off getting new glasses.
It may be needful to say that in addition to all this, Mrs. Wallace was a Believer, even though she didn't feel a need to wear the cross because she felt no drive to proclaim her faith to others, and she had memorized all the interesting bits of the Bible anyway. (Revelations had always been her favorite chapter, especially the verses about the Four Horsemen.) But Mrs. Wallace Believed. She Believed in angels and Heaven like some people believe in extraterrestrial life and witchcraft and the tooth fairy. So when Mrs. Wallace heard the sky open like ripping fabric and crashing eighteen-wheelers and cracking stone, she shuffled to the window, pushed aside the fringed drape with her thin, veined hands, and looked out.
She looked out, and she knew what it was, and she had a word for it, which she didn't have a chance to use. A moment later, she (like others who shared her Beliefs) was falling to the floor as her soul escaped. It was an oily, glimmering patch in the air, and it rather resembled gasoline fumes, but more silvery. It crawled through the window and floated upwards, and its formless shape was not buffeted by the sudden wind whirling towards the vortex.
Her body dissolved into nothing by the end of the day.
***
If Missy Velveteen (also known as Drake Jacobson, this year's Most Fabulous Drag Princess) had known that she'd be accosted by a crowd of sign-toting “anti-homosexualists,” she would have taken a different route home. As it was, they clustered around her, most of them with eyes averted except to flicker hostile glances at her, her fabulous shoes, the glitter in her hair that shimmered even in the gray light that filtered through the clouds. There was a minister with them, like a woodsman in this forest of signs, and he and a middle-aged woman in a drab dress followed her as she shouldered through the crowd. They were murmuring passive-aggressive prayers at her, and people in the crowd were muttering under their breaths.
Then someone, who hadn't been paying attention, turned and collided with her. The man at fault apologized immediately, much to the shock and disgruntlement of his companions, but the fact could not be changed that the man's drink had indeed spilled, and a brown stain was slowly spreading down the front of Missy's dress: frills, spangles, sequins and all.
She had only one thought as she stared, horrified, at the hideous blob:
I only just finished this outfit!
It was a fiery, indignant thought, and had she been Ex Persona (as she liked to put it – it made her sound educated), she would have had no qualms about attacking the guilty party with words as sharp as the heels of her best purple stilettos. However, Missy liked to think of herself in certain ways, and these ways dictated that flinging herself into a torrent of abuse Was Not Ladylike, and goddammit, if there was one thing she was, it was a Lady. Despite ten years of martial arts training behind her from a childhood and a past life that she didn't particularly bother to remember, and therefore the knowledge that she could have taken the bastard down, she reminded herself of the Code of a Lady, and merely smiled politely and began to accept the man's apology.
Except then someone in the crowd snickered, “Hur, hur, hur.” Missy could take a lot, and had taken a lot (in multiple senses of the word, she liked to joke), but one thing that the Code did not proscribe was that she had to tolerate being laughed at.
The next thing she knew, she was standing with her hands on her hips, back as stiff as a rebar, while she shouted the most vicious insults she'd ever invented, even counting the time her last boyfriend broke up with her. “And everyone who's got a problem with me can just go to Hell and get my suite ready for me!” she bellowed.
Then the day's strange silence was broken. The traffic had sounded blunt and muffled, but this noise screamed and cut through the air like the shrill of a siren, and very suddenly, a blinding brightness exploded from the sky and everyone looked away. The sign-toters, startled, fell to their knees, or clutched each other and started crying. Missy didn't even have time to stop ranting before the invisible tsunami hit. “Drop dead!”
She didn't know what it was, but she gaped as twenty seven of the twenty eight sign-toters reeled, collapsed, and crumpled to the ground. The only one left standing was the man who had spilled his drink on her. He still clutched what was left of it – iced coffee. Mocha, actually, extra whipped cream, chocolate sprinkles, skim milk. And a horrified, guilty expression.
Missy glared coolly at him for a moment, and when the others didn't move after a moment, she came forward slowly and prodded the minister with the toe of her shoe. When the man didn't move, Missy poked him again, significantly harder, and heard a dull thump as her foot connected. She stared, and came to the only conclusion she could. She'd killed these people with the power of her own awesomeness.
She looked at the one left over – ah, she knew that expression. He'd realized how hot she was, and now he had to deal with that. She smirked and flipped her hair and walked away, congratulating herself on turning another one, and paid no mind to the rip in the sky, nor to the distant sound of trumpets and angel-song. It didn't seem to have much to do with her anyway. She was magic, and Chanda LaMour could just eat her heart out, that bitch. And was that guy going to follow her or not?
Behind her, the crowd's souls crawled out of their bodies – most of them floated vaguely heavenward, but a few of them did as they had been bidden: They sank through the sidewalk, and the ground smoked where they had touched it.
***
Trent Cohen tried not to dream. He didn't like his dreams. It wasn't that they were unpleasant. Indeed, he could remember quite a few dreams that had been extremely enjoyable. It was just that they were always, well... irrational. Trent didn't like irrationality. People, yes, everyone's unpredictable now and then; irrational numbers, certainly: Math had always been his favorite subject in school, and irrational numbers made sense, at least.
Dreams were not predictable, except when they were, except when they weren't. When Trent dreamed, he'd awaken violently embarrassed and with not a small measure of bafflement. If other people knew the disturbingly fanciful things his subconscious projected on his sleeping mind, well... Trent didn't like to think about it.
He didn't believe in anything. Not God, not fate or love at first sight – not even science. His parents had made it clear from an early age that there was no Santa Claus, that fairies were the creations of primitive, uneducated European tribes, and that the Christians' God, or any god, for that matter, was “an elaborate fantasy sustained purely so insecure, needy people can sleep at night with the comforting notion that there is someone they c
an blame for their actions.” Then Trent's parents convinced him to join the American Civil Liberties Union at the tender age of thirteen, because unfortunately but unsurprisingly, he couldn't believe in the government either.
In short, Trent was an atheist and bitter about it. People with beliefs confused him, and he was envious and frustrated at the way their beliefs seemed to grease their lives. His own simply plodded. It had plodded through breakfast that morning, and it shuffled through work until lunchtime, when it took a break for some high-intensity listlessness. He'd brought some tuna salad made from the canned fish that didn't even have the words “dolphin safe” on the label. He thought that fishers would be interested in dolphins in the same way he himself was interested in the arguments about global warming – that is to say, not at all. It still made him feel a little reckless.
And now, his white plastic fork poised over the possibly dolphin-unsafe tuna salad, Trent didn't like dreams because the sky had a hole in it. His first thought was not terrorists, because he didn't believe in them, and besides, terrorists were things that happened to other people. Although Trent believed in nothing, he knew the Facts of Life, especially when pertaining to his own well-being:
Fact of Life #47: Eating the fire-hot chili from that one Mexican restaurant causes indigestion and really strange dreams.
He wrinkled his brow, frowned, and hoped he'd wake up soon. Then he returned to his tuna salad and wished he could bring himself to be at least a little superstitious.
***
The two of them stood on Dylan #2's porch and grumbled. Being what they were had been Dylan #1's idea, as most of their decisions were, and Dylan #2, being himself, had gone along with it, because Dylan #1 suggested it.
So now they prided themselves – or, at least, Dylan #1 did and Dylan #2 agreed – that they were smarter than anyone else because they were waiting for proof of a god to believe in. It had started as an excuse to get Dylan #2 free on Sunday mornings, but over the past two years, four months, week and six days, Dylan #1 had come to a few conclusions, which was why he was grumbling on Dylan #2's porch that noon.
“This doesn't mean anything, Dylan,” he said to Dylan #2.
“I know,” Dylan #2 agreed.
“It's probably just a hallucination from your mom's meatloaf. Cause Camus didn't say anything about this. I think.”
“Right.”
They fell into silence again, watching the clouds swirling in the white glow of the vortex, and the shimmering, far-off glints that streamed towards it. Presently, Dylan #1 got up and walked into the yard, hands in his pockets.
“Where are you going?” Dylan #2 asked.
Dylan #1 cast a critical eye over the vortex, and took a deep breath. “We still don't have enough proof to believe!” he bawled at it, as loud as he could.
***
Mara, who believed in fairies, Mara, who wished on the waxing crescent moon when the horns pointed up and held the luck, who owned silver jewelry and a cat, who burned incense and had an unhealthy fondness for purple skirts, Mara who murmured “Blessed Be” to a sneezing friend – Mara was standing on her front porch with her cat and waiting.
She was watching when the last of the souls entered the vortex, and so she saw the explosion in the sky and the torrent from the ground – she saw the fire of Heaven and the brimstone of Hell, and she saw the deadly destruction that was wreaked in the crossfire, and wondered how many other people were going to die.
Her neighbor across the street had probably just died, crushed by the boulder that had just flattened his house. She was sorry, but that'd teach him for shoving crosses in her face. Karma, she'd always said, was a bitch and a half.
***
Meanwhile, Lucien was still standing at the edge of the forest, staring up at the gleaming vortex, and scuffing his shoe on the ground in irritation.
All at once, with a crack like the bursting of a firework or a tree struck by lightning, seven angels came from the vortex, each of them carrying a gold trumpet. Their wings were pure and white, the longest feathers painted in many colors and tipped in gold, and they gleamed even in the weak light. They lit upon the ground in the center of the field and they raised their trumpets to their lips.
When the first angel sounded his trumpet, fire and hail rained from the thick dark clouds. The open field was untouched by the fall, as if the eye of a storm.
Lucien whipped his shirt off and let his wings manifest, covering his head with them to protect himself from the hail as the second angel blew her trumpet, and it sounded like it was blowing from across a roaring rush of water. When the third angel joined in the chaos, the dark clouds suddenly cleared, revealing the sky to be dark as night; she played, and the stars fell from the heavens in silvery ribbons. Lucien had to laugh at that, clutching his sides and leaning against his tree when he wheezed with mirth.
When the fourth angel set breath to blow, the moon and sun skidded across the sky and eclipsed, and began whirling together across the firmament; the dark moon and its halo of fire. Lucien wiped the tears from his eyes and sniggered: Merely illusions, a lightshow.
Then the fifth angel added to the cacophony. A bright light like a star shot from the vortex of Ríel into the gaping maw of the Lower Realm. The earth shuddered once and fell still. Then from the pit rose a cloud of smoke, and it darkened the air as it rose. Lucien stopped laughing; that had certainly been no illusion.
“Come on...” Lucien whispered, tightly gripping the red handles of his daggers.
The sixth angel sounded her trumpet. A voice came thundering from the vortex, in the tongue of the Higher Realm, and Lucien heard a thrill of celestial song.
Imagine ten thousand people singing all at once. Now imagine that they're all singing the same song. Each of them is right on-key and every single one of them hits the notes flawlessly, even the difficult parts. Imagine that they sing with joy and sorrow, with hope and despair, and that their hair shines, halo-like, in the light of Ríel as their wingbeats keep time...
That's the Celestial Choir.
Lucien remembered the Higher Realm in a pang of sorrow long forgotten, and the Light, and the song. And then he remembered Falling.
It was at that point that the seventh angel sounded the seventh golden trumpet, and the armies of Ríel flowed out of the vortex in shining silver armor, and tunics of blue, with their feet bare and their hair flowing, with flaming swords and golden halos and many-colored wings.
Yet as the armies of the Higher Realm were hurtling towards the ground, the gaping pit opened a little wider, and then demons with long, skinny legs, slick black skin and bulbous yellow eyes were crawling up the sides like spiders, or frogs. They threw down filthy, rotting ropes, which the others, following, swarmed up. Those of the Army of Rielat that could fly burst forth first, swarmed above the ground like locusts. From the pit clambered muscled demons with scarlet skin and tall, twisted horns and wide shoulders; the gaunt, spider-frog ones, with pointy teeth and claws, who hissed like cats; tall, thin devils with lanky hair, white skin and eyes; and snakelike demons with human faces; and those like Lucien, with gleaming hair, pale faces, and unearthly, beautiful features – the Fallen. Some flew in the locust-swarm, but the wingless ones, the ones who had fought their Fall, those rode on the backs of great beasts that snorted clouds of sparks and scraped at the grass with sharp, flinty hooves.
The Army of Ríel dropped to the ground, folded their gleaming wings, and waited, still and silent while the Army of Rielat gnashed its teeth or snarled and clawed at the air or glared in the cold fury of those thrown from their rightful place. Lucien, hiding in the cover of trees, waited too.
***
Their blue, gold and white banners snapped open in the breeze that kicked up, and the soldiers stayed perfectly still, but for the gentle waving of their hair and of their clothes. The rushing sound of Michael's perpetual irritation and rage quieted in his head and died out. He was calm. He was peaceful. The breeze blew into his face, carrying the acrid s
cent of sulfur and smoke from the opposing army.
The wind was rising, he noted, as he gazed across to the enemy.
***
It blew through Lucifer's hair, loose, free, silver as temptation. He, and Belial at his right hand, were still as the Celestial Army.
“My lord?”
Lucifer closed his beautiful eyes, tilted his head back, breathed in the free air. He'd seen Michael standing at the head of the army, then. Belial glared at the opposing general across the field.
“This battle,” he murmured, “this battle isn't against the Power, Belial.”
Belial turned his attention back to his prince. “What?”
The Prince of Darkness pinned him with the barest glance. “It won't be me against the Sko Meala. It won't be the tainted against all that is pure. It's not about those. Those don't matter.”
Belial struggled not to stagger back a step under the weight of those eyes. “I'm sorry, my lord, but what do you mean?”
“It's not Good against Evil, or chaos verses order.” Lucifer nodded at the opposing army. “It's us against them. You and I and our army against theirs. Michael versus myself,” the Prince murmured. “My beloved enemy.”
“...Beloved, my lord?”
“I've always considered Michael so,” Lucifer said softly, gesturing for his army to prepare. “Haven't you?” Belial shifted uncomfortably with a clank of black armor and wished his lord could have been convinced to wear armor as well. “Let us go to our beloved, then.”
Lucifer snapped his fingers. Somewhere in the army, a gong sounded, then a flare of crude trumpets.
***
With a roar that only they could cry, the army of the Lower Realm charged forward, tattered banners of old-blood and stained yellow tearing through the air above them. A shout from Michael, and the army drew their swords as one, singing their war cries in the angels' language. They stood ready as the oncoming army broke upon them like water upon the rocks.
In the End Page 3