In the End

by Alexandra Rowland

  Fallen struck seraphim, angel smote the monsters of the deeps, and over both sides, death loomed. Lucien watched, alone, as the Last Battle was fought, a lone witness at the End.

  He saw groups of demons crushed by opposing platoons; he saw the Higher Realm's shieldwalls swarmed and broken. He saw an angel chase down one of the Fallen, and the two stalled in a fatal deadlock near the edge of the forest. For a moment, Lucien considered darting out with his daggers to help – but which one? The angel was the obvious choice, but he didn't want to give Rielat a whit more assistance than they had. His action now could be the difference in the outcome of the battle.

  But it was too late, the angel had been stabbed in the chest, and the Fallen had caught her last panicked slash with his neck. The Fallen collapsed, and choking on blood, the angel stumbled away from the battle, into the forest, and caught sight of Lucien. Before she could so much as raise her arm for a final weak blow, she too fell to her knees.

  There was no way to save her. She had fallen without a sound, her hair pooling in the grass, stained red as her blood soaked into it. Lucien didn't want to touch her. She was out of sight of Rielat's army, here; she wouldn't be disturbed. He left her in peace and went to find a new place from which to watch.

  The battle raged on; first one side prevailed, then the other, beating each other back and forth, deadlocked. Soldiers of both sides alike fell like stones; war was waged on the ground and in the air, opponents chasing their foes and everyone trying to run each other into the ground. Lucien climbed nimbly up a moss covered tree to get a better look at the battle: They were well matched, these two armies, for where the forces of Ríel were skilled, deft, and orderly, the opposition made up for it in numbers, ferocity, and brute strength.

  Suddenly, Lucien heard a rustling and the snap of a few twigs beneath him. He looked down, only to see a mop of disheveled hair – and an angel attached to it. The angel's wings were manifest, one held in a stiff position and streaked with blood. His blue tunic was ripped on one shoulder from a nasty gash (talons, perhaps?), which was oozing down his arm. As Lucien watched, the angel looked around frantically, gasping wildly for breath, and began climbing the very tree that Lucien was already in. Lucien ducked out of sight behind the trunk until the angel seated himself on a slightly lower limb on the other side of the tree, leaned against the mossy green trunk and began to catch his breath.

  Lucien peeked out from behind the trunk and studied him curiously. He had a smaller, more delicate build than the other angelic soldiers the Fallen had seen, and his face was framed in soft russet. Beautiful, of course, like any angel, even though he was covered in muck and mud and battle gore. He craned his neck, looking at the wound across his shoulder. He clearly had no idea what to do with it – he prodded at it in distress, wincing, and dabbed at it with a bit of his sleeve, which wasn't any cleaner than the wound itself. He still held his wing awkward angle. Lucien would assume a sprain, possibly dislocation; when the wind caught and shifted it, the angel tensed and squeaked with pain.

  “Need some help with that?” Lucien asked as he stepped down and across to the other branch, settling casually against the trunk. The angel started and scrabbled for a sword which wasn't at his belt. Harmless. Lucien smiled. “I'll make you a deal: I won't kill you if you won't kill me. I'd like to get out of this mess –” he jerked his head towards the battle, “– alive. So which side are you rooting for?”

  “Demon!” the angel cried, scrabbling to get farther away; he nearly fell off the branch.

  “Nah,” Lucien said amiably. “Fallen, actually.” The angel was still poised defensively as far out on the branch as he could manage without falling, brandishing a small dagger – more of a penknife, really – at Lucien with shaking hands. “Here. Angelkins,” Lucien drawled. “I don't want to die, you don't want to die: I really don't see how this is anything but a win-win situation, do you?”

  “And then you kill me as soon as I let my guard down!” the angel snapped, wincing. His wing was caught on some twigs and he was having trouble freeing it without hurting himself or taking his eyes off Lucien.

  “I don't know why I would bother doing that.”

  “And I'm supposed to trust you or something?”

  “I'm not a liar.”

  “Oh, really? Well, that makes me feel so much better,” the angel snarled.

  Lucien raised his eyebrows. “No need to get vicious. If I wanted to kill you...” Lucien drew one of his daggers from the sheath. “See? Shiny, shiny.” The silver edge of the black blade glinted.

  The angel went still. “Go ahead, then,” he demanded quietly. “Do it. Kill me. They don't want me.” He flung his arm out towards the battle in a wide gesture. “No one does. I might as well be dead, so just make. It. Quick.”

  Lucien sheathed the dagger, leaned back against the trunk, and folded his arms. The angel really was a pretty creature, even covered in guts like he was. Nothing a good bucket of water over the head wouldn't cure. “Maybe I don't want to kill you.”

  “What?? Why not?”

  Lucien shrugged, smiled again. “Supposing our places were switched? I wouldn't want to die for no reason other than... because you're allegedly my enemy, or because of a few thousand years' grudge. Although I don't claim to be innocent of that last one. You, though, you haven't done anything to me.”

  The angel sputtered for a moment before he found his words. “I AM your enemy, demon!”

  Another shrug. “I'm not yours. It wasn't your fault I was Felled. As far as I know. You don't seem like a bad sort. Can't imagine what you're doing in the army, though, you don't seem to be very good at it.”

  The angel growled and stabbed wildly at Lucien. He blocked easily, but the angel's wing was still tangled in the branches and he couldn't catch himself, and he overbalanced and grabbed at Lucien when he realized he was starting to fall, bringing them both toppling out of the tree. Lucien landed on the uneven ground fifteen feet below with a sickening thud, the angel sprawled atop him. The angel had lost his dagger when they'd fallen, but it only took him a fraction of a second to adapt and regroup, fling himself at Lucien, and attempt to get a throttling grip around Lucien's throat. Lucien, the wind knocked out of him by the fall, had been momentarily stunned, not to mention a bit impressed with the angel's quick recovery. Nevertheless, he managed to throw the angel off and clamber to his feet.

  The angel stumbled up as well, entirely ungraceful, still favoring his injured wing and shoulder. Lucien coughed and cleared his throat – that had been a good grip. “I suppose if you really want to fight, I can't stop you.”

  “Demon!” the angel hissed. He glanced about for his dagger, edging away from Lucien as he did so.

  “Fallen.” Lucien corrected again. “Bit of a sore spot, I'd prefer not to talk about it.” The angel had found the knife now; Lucien dodged an awkward tackle. “I'm sure you have a similar one,” he continued as he continued to evade each unskilled stab and thrust. “Possibly even – whoops – two or three. You're the strong, silent type, aren't – whoa, nice one there! -- aren't you? I never – really saw the point of – fighting someone I don't have to, but I'm sure – that you have your reasons.”

  “Shut. Up.” The angel panted, falling back to catch his breath.

  “Hey, I'm just making conversation. You tell me when you get tired and we'll stop.” With the next desperate stab, Lucien batted the angel's wrist away, sending the small knife spinning into the foliage somewhere, lost again. The two of them stared after it, the angel still panting slightly. “Well then. Want one of mine?”

  The angel staggered back, leaning on his good shoulder against a tree and panting. His face was ashen and his wound was oozing more openly now.

  Lucien eyed it and held out one of the two angelslayers, hilt first. “Come on. I'm getting less and less interested in killing you with every stab and punch you throw at me. You're very interesting, but it's just unfair for you to be unarmed.”

  The angel glared.

/>   “You really don't like talking much, do you?”

  “At least I'm not obsessed with the sound of my own voice.”

  Lucien ignored him. Rude when stressed – not an uncommon reaction. “Here, take it.” He tossed the knife underhand near the angel's feet. He'd almost caught his breath again and now looked suspiciously at Lucien. “It's not poisoned,” Lucien said. The angel scowled at the blade. “Well, okay, yeah, it's cursed. Angelslayer, after all... Just don't stab yourself anywhere vital. You'll be fine.”

  “Excuse me? You want me to fight with – with – What makes it an angelslayer?”

  Lucien opened his mouth, then closed it again. “You know, I've never found out. Some kind of magic.” Lucien regarded the knife with interest. “We heal rather well, don't we? Knives like this are just better at killing our kind. It's complicated. I don't know anything about enchantments. But it'll work on me just as well as you, so now we're more even.”

  The angel touched his fingertips to the red leather-wrapped hilt, jerking them back and touching it again as if he was judging whether the handle of a pan was too hot to touch. When it seemed to cause him no harm, he picked it up. “It's heavy.”

  “Never really noticed.” He was unprepared when the angel flew at him – metaphorically, of course – and barely managed to get out of the way. The blade nicked his cheek and he grabbed the angel's arm before he could draw back out of Lucien's personal space. He grinned. “I like you, little angel. You're not as boring as the rest of them.” The angel struggled away, distracting Lucien from a niggling urgent thought that had surfaced in his mind. “Come on, try again.” This time when his opponent attacked, Lucien caught the blade the angel wielded with his own and twisted it away. He picked it up off the ground and was holding it out again before the angel could collect himself. “Want to do that over?”

  The angel growled in frustration and snatched the knife away. Lucien blocked his next blows in quick succession – one two three – before he scratched on the last and nicked the angel's wrist.

  The angel gasped, dropped the knife, clutching his wrist to his breastplate with the thin, pale fingers of his other hand – not a soldier's hands, Lucien noticed.

  He winced in sympathy. “Sorry, didn't mean to. Wait, hold on, let me look at it.” The angel had suddenly gone limp, possibly with shock at Lucien's apology. His knees had buckled, so Lucien knelt too. He congratulated himself and wiped the blood off the angel's wrist with his own sleeve. It wasn't a bad cut at all. He'd seen paper cuts worse than this. “Are you ready to stop yet?”

  He looked at the angel again, expecting to see – well, honestly, he was expecting the angel to fall over fawning at how cool and generous and merciful Lucien was. Not that he actually wanted that to happen. (Except, okay, he secretly did.) He was surprised to see that the angel's attention wasn't on him whatsoever – he was looking away to the battle with an expression of panic and mounting horror. Lucien snapped his gaze to the field, where the two armies had stopped fighting, finished gathering up the injured, and were pouring back from whence they came. And that was why the angel had gone limp.

  The pair scrambled their feet in unison and raced to the edge of the forest, making it into the open just as the last of the demons leaped into the pit and a single, lone, final angel, carrying a gilded banner pole with the scraps of flag just clinging to it, flew through the gate to Ríel.

  Beside Lucien, the angel cried out, a terrified, heart-wrenching sound, and launched himself into the air. A moment later, he fell with a shriek of pain from a few feet above ground. His wing had given out.

  Lucien, silent and horrified, looked on. This wasn't, couldn't be real. This was a dream, surely. He felt as detached from what was happening as if it was a scene in a movie he was witnessing after entering the wrong theater at the cinema.

  The angel was crumpled at his feet, crying and screaming at the celestial portal to wait, don't leave him, please please no...

  But the vortex closed, slowly and inexorably in on itself as it vanished; and as Above, so Below: The pit shut with an earthy snap.

  Lucien was sure they were about to die. That was it. The end of everything. The war happened, Lucien missed entirely who had won (if anyone; perhaps no one), and now they were going to wink out of existence. They were going to just stop being. He was thousands of years old, and he'd spent most of those thousands of years locked in the dark, surviving day after sunless day, living for moments in the free air of the land between the Two Realms. And this was it. Facing death wasn't as horrible as it had been in the past. The difference, he supposed, was now that he didn't have a choice.

  Nothing happened. The waiting was awful, and the angel was still in a heap on the ground, shaking violently and still sobbing intermittently. Lucien didn't move to help him. He closed his eyes and waited for the world to stop.

  The angel fell silent after a few minutes and got to his feet. Lucien opened his eyes. The grass blew in the wind. The sky was cloudy. It was going to rain later in the evening.

  Seventy percent chance, Lucien's brain supplied. If he was lucky, the world might last long enough for the rain to come.

  As one, they walked silently out into the middle of the field. The grass that covered where the pit had been was as fresh as if it had never been touched. Lucien stood in the middle of it, and looked down in silence at the simple blades of green that covered it. The angel, standing quite near, stared up at the sky with an expression that Lucien understood completely.

  “Why?” the angel asked, but the word, whispered to the heavens, was stolen by the wind.

  ***

  The angel didn't cry after that. He didn't mourn, he didn't sob, he certainly didn't fall to his knees and weep any further. He stood.

  And something slowly presented itself to Lucien – perhaps the world wouldn't cease after all. And then Lucien thought. He thought fast and hard about what this meant, why he'd been left. If the world didn't cease at all, this meant... This meant he could stay here, in the Center Realm. Forever.

  He didn't dare hope for it.

  The angel began puttering, which caught Lucien's attention – he had begun to drag the dead angels into a heap, pausing to pull a painted feather from a wing of each dead angel. Lucien sat in the middle of the green circle of grass and watched. Was he going to try to find enough stones to build a cairn, or would he opt for burning the bodies instead? Lucien thought that a bonfire was a better idea – it would remove the more incriminating evidence of the battle. After all, if the humans discovered such things, he'd have to be careful indeed.

  But the field seemed vast from here. The grass was a foot high, waving like a sea around him where he sat, and there were so, so many bodies – as many angels as demons and Fallen. Lucien wondered why the angel – the one that was actually alive -- wasn't simply setting the entire field afire. It would be much more efficient, and would get rid of both the divine and infernal corpses at once, as well as the gore that wasn't as easily moved. The rain later on might even put out the fire before any extensive damage was done. In any case, it was an irritating question, and it rattled about in his skull like marbles in a tin box, so he climbed to his feet, brushed off his hands and shoved them in his pockets, and began picking his way around the bodies towards the angel.

  The angel was struggling – he was breathing heavily, his eyes dull and his cheeks flushed with exertion. His hands up to his wrists were even more filthy than they had been before, and a scarlet smear bisected his forehead where he'd wiped the sweat and the damp, russet strands from his brow. And yet he was still working, wings tucked away into non-existence like Lucien kept his own. He dragged a large infantry angel towards the heap. The dead angel's arms were thick, sinewy with muscle, and he would have been taller than the little redhead if standing, and twice as thick. Lucien swept down and seized the corpse's ankles, and within a moment, the body was flung onto the heap with the rest.

  The angel glared at him. “Leave me alone.”

&
nbsp; “I just wanted to know what you're doing.”

  “Only what should be done.” His glower faltered – his eyes dropped to the ground and he nodded once. “Honoring the dead. They should lay in dignity.”

  Lucien didn't think a heap was very dignified, but he didn't say anything about that. “Right, that's a good idea,” he said. “But why don't we just honor them by setting the whole thing ablaze?”

  “The Beloved shall not burn with their enemies,” the angel spat.

  “Ah,” said Lucien. “Well, can I help you with this, then?”

  The angel turned away and began tugging a feather loose from the slain infantryman. “There's no point,” he muttered. “It won't matter soon anyway.” He rose, stuck the feather into a pocket, and wandered away, brushing a lock of hair away and once again smudging his cheek with red. “It won't matter!” he screamed at the heavens.

  Lucien backed away. The other end of the field would be a good place for Rielat's corpses. He'd have a tidy pile, and he wouldn't be too close to that angel – just in case he snapped and attacked him again. Then he'd set his on fire, since the angel was so picky.

  Half an hour later, Lucien gave up: Piling bodies was simply boring. Even studying the interesting ways they'd died had lost its charm after the first ten minutes. It was just stab wounds and endless, endless fatal slashes as far as the eye could see. The celestial army was so dull with their methods; the angel definitely had the better job – at least Lucien had seen some gouges and things on the bodies of the celestial army.

  There wasn't anyone to talk to. Lucien was getting absolutely sick of the smell, and he couldn't stand the wet, slick feeling of blood on his hands.

  “I'd rather risk attack from him than stick around here in the stink,” he said to the corpse of a spider-frog as he dragged it gingerly by one slimy, clammy leg to his heap. In addition, the overcast sky was weighing heavy, pressing down on the back of his neck like the air was being sucked out of the world. It wasn't anything, he told himself. It wasn't ending. It was just the hard work and the cloying scent of death and a penetrating damp in the air.