"It helps enough that they have their halos," Lucifer said. "But I would not mind the teaching."
"How is it, then?" Asrial said, glancing at Mephistopheles's brow, the radiance glimmering off his dark hair. "The halos. Do you think you can stay here with them?"
"It's strange," Lucifer said. "Before, we could not have used them. I built this dimension myself, and there was nothing in the formula to permit it... we were too far from Him. But it's almost as if God has been through Hell, and woven a thread of light through it. Just enough to allow us to keep them."
"Just enough for us to hear Him," Mephistopheles said softly.
"Are you surprised?" Asrial asked, smiling.
Lucifer returned her smile with half of his own. "Not at all." He held out a hand to her, which she took.
"A little miracle," Mephistopheles said.
"One of many," Lucifer murmured, and they contemplated it in silence together, and found peace in it.
“Mephistopheles,” Asrial said after a while. “What did you tell Stephen, in Heaven? When you thought it was too late.”
Lucifer arched a brow.
Mephistopheles looked at her. "Is it important?"
"I'd like to know," she said.
Mephistopheles shrugged and told her. They were all silent afterwards, watching the firelight.
“Will you stay long?” Lucifer asked.
Asrial stared at her interlaced fingers, an image, an intention forming in her mind. “Not this time. There are things I must do... things I would like to do.”
Lucifer brought her hand to his lips, kissed her fingers. “We await the day.”
Asrial smiled, curved her hand around his jaw. She touched Mephistopheles’s shoulder, then said quietly, “My lord... I think I would like to go home. But there is something you can help me with before I go.”
Asrial erupted from the tear into the giddy brilliance of Heaven’s morning. Her wings stretched taut, and new feathers snapped into the empty sockets, arabesques of golden dust spiraling from the barbs. Her wrists and ankles lost their lace of blood and frayed skin. The music of the Creation spilled into her and filled her again, at last, with her halo to mediate it, to keep it from whelming her.
Joyous circles she traced in the sky as she laughed, pirouetting in the light spring breeze. Through the air of Shamayim, across its radiant sunlit translucence, she skipped and danced, flexing each feather and holding out open arms to the rising sun.
The currents carried her past the halo mount, its bell tower silent. Asrial’s eyes roamed over it. She took one last breath and then headed to the Gate into Raquia. She had one last errand.
Then... the songs in Zebul, and the sunrise on her favorite ledge. A bath in one of Heaven's tiny stream, and a new chiton. She would dance to His music and laugh when it freed the tears of joy from the vessel of her body. She had shed the veils over her eyes. Her soul rejoiced in the Lord.
She sang as she flew.
Stephen woke with a start on the couch. The perfume of Heaven teased his nostrils, already fading from the coarse yarn of the afghan wrapped around his body.
“Asrial?” He licked his cracked lips and swallowed past the sleep-taste in his mouth. No one answered him, so he pulled himself upright and checked his room.
The blankets were mussed and the cup beside his night table empty, but she was gone. Stephen leaned on the door jamb and sighed. “Couldn’t have lasted forever, could it,” he muttered, then smiled wryly at himself.
The clock beside the bed read 5:45 AM. A Monday morning. Stephen rolled his shoulders back, then rubbed one absently. He still had to grade papers... but there was time before class to do that, and maybe watch the sunrise.
He picked up his folder from the bedroom and stopped in the kitchen to check the small refrigerator. He left it with a yellow apple in one hand and the folder under his arm, walking for the door, when something stopped him. Something about the room.
Stephen gave it a cursory once-over, saw nothing out of place. On his second, more deliberate survey, he found it: a dull wink of something on the desk beside the fireplace. He approached the table, each step separated by a long pause.
It was the glitter of gold that had attracted him; veins of it running through some of the dull gray stones. Five sets of ten pebbles, some smooth and others rough, some dark and others light and still others variegated or split through with veins of gold, silver, and iron. The additional beads separating each decade followed the same pattern, if larger.
Stephen put down the apple and folder to lift the rosary with trembling fingers. Long threads of hair, braided copper-gold and black, connected the stones. He let his gaze drop, bead by bead, down to the climax of the rosary.
The cross had been tied together with a thinner tendril of braided copper-gold hair: a small, asymmetrical cross formed from a long thorn stained black and a splinter of wood bleached gold.
Stephen’s eyes closed.
He could not put it down. In the end, he found a soft pouch he used to carry his Bible and placed it inside, mindful of the thorn. He tied it to his belt, ignoring the occasional bite of the cross through the fabric, then picked up his papers and breakfast.
Stephen walked outside, behind his building to the field. There he leaned back, unmarked exams in his lap. He bit into the apple and watched the sun rise.
Clad in purest white bordered in silver-gilt embroidery, the female angels danced down the stairs, tossing rose petals. Seeing them pour from the throat of the birthplace, Gabriel waved his free hand to the nearest. “Are we too late?”
“Oh no!” the angel said. “They’re still opening.” Her eyes lingered on the man leaning heavily against Gabriel’s side, and she stopped beside him. Drawing the garland of opalescent lilies and curling ferns from her arm, she arranged it with gentle white hands around that angel’s shoulders before the dancers drew her away again into Heaven’s vibrant morning.
Raphael caressed the garland with trembling fingers, his barren wings tightly pressed to his back. Gabriel smiled at him, then helped him up the warm stone stairs to Zebul’s main birthplace.
Ruth stood before the doors. “Gabriel, Raphael! Come! They’re waking. The first have already come forth.”
Raphael lifted dark eyes. “They live?”
She rested her hand on his shoulder, and her smile had a hint of solemn tenderness. “Of course.”
Raphael closed his eyes.
The silence that surrounded them seemed insulated from the celebration, the petals floating on the soft spring breeze. Gabriel looked at Ruth from over Raphael’s bowed head, and his lips framed the name silently, his eyes making it a question: Michael?
She shook her head.
“Come,” the Choir Director of the Sixth Heaven said after a few moments. “We have mourned our dead. It is time to celebrate our living.”
“Amen, my sister,” Gabriel said, hushed but fervent. They passed over the threshold into the warm darkness of the birthplace. Zebul’s had been built larger, loftier than the smaller ones near the edges of Heaven. Grand columns of brown stone smoothed down by countless hands braced the vaulted ceilings, and sunlight streamed through the orange, gold, scarlet and roseate stained glass windows. Tesserae of warm light danced on the stone floors.
The three stood on the ledge overlooking the birthplace floor with its several score cloth-of-gold and chalcedony nests glittering in the light. Incense and dust mixed in heavy shrouds in the air, fragrant with the sweetness of dissolved globes, and angels moved in and out of them, greeting the newly born, clothing them and leading them up the stairs to the ledge where others of the Ninth waited to joyfully receive them.
Raphael took a shaking step forward as one of the globes below them cracked. Its halves sprang apart, and from it a body unfolded, arms spreading upward with the grace of a flower opening to the sun. The female angel rose to her feet and the globe’s pieces disintegrated, spiraling up to her brow and crowning her in a golden dust that spun until it c
oalesced. Finer dust skidded off the new halo, falling to pattern her skin with a net of iridescence.
Raphael stumbled down the brown steps to stand before her. A tunic was deposited in his nerveless hands by a gentle bystander, and he stepped forward, uncertainty in his every motion.
But she lifted great, grave eyes the color of storm-bellied skies to him, and allowed him to drape the fabric over her, clip it at her shoulders. Her white wings were barred with rain-silver and the gray of clouds.
“What is your name, little sister?” Raphael asked, holding her hands, feeling their warmth, their very realness.
“Nirel.” Her voice was a soft alto. Her eyes traveled without guile over his denuded wing-arms. “What happened to your wings?”
His lower lip quivered, and he smiled though his eyes had filmed with tears. “A test of faith I gave myself. Come up with us?”
“Yes.”
From the ledge, Ruth and Gabriel watched solemnly as the archangel on the floor of the birthplace drew the new angel away from her nest and toward the stairs. They barely heard the last exchange.
“Who are you, brother?”
“I don’t know yet. But I may be a healer... in time.”
“I don’t want to go to school.”
“I don’t care, Cat,” Chris said with a grin, balancing the laundry basket against her hip. The newspaper classifieds stuck rakishly from one of its corners. “Kick that no-good boyfriend of yours off the couch and into the shower and get out of the house.”
Marie sighed. “It just seems so dumb. How can we go back to normal life after having watched the Apocalypse and then spent Sunday morning listening to angels sing?”
“You’ll figure out a way,” Chris said. She rummaged through the basket and wrinkled her nose at the sight of a charcoal gray sweater, stained with blood. “Mmph. This is going to be a bear to get out.”
After Brad had showered and joined her downstairs, Marie picked up her book-bag. “Are you sure I can’t stay home?” she asked her mother.
Chris rolled her eyes. “You’re going to miss the bus if you don’t get moving.”
Brad grinned. “Yeah, but what are you going to do?”
Chris tilted her head. “The laundry.” She grinned. “Get moving.”
Marie sighed and padded to the front door, pushing it open. Chris listened to the door opening and smiled fiercely, reaching for the classifieds. She’d already opened them to the relevant section. There was always a need for skilled doctors....
“MOM!”
Chris stopped and frowned. She stalked to the front door. “Cat, stop hedging and get out—”
“Mom!” Marie was standing on the gravel path, mouth agape. “There’s—well there’s a horse on the lawn.”
The yellow horse lifted its head and stared at Chris.
“An Apocalyptic horse, even,” Brad added, grinning.
“I see that,” Chris said. She laughed. “Get moving.”
“But what are we going to do with him?”
Chris shrugged, walked to the horse. She petted its head as it lipped her bathrobe. “We’ll figure something out. Won’t we?”
The horse whuffed.
The bird flew over the burnt and plowed earth of the field, riding currents still heavily laden with the dust of Heaven. There would be riotous flowers come spring.
Its errand spent, the grackle circled the field, then banked toward the forest. It knew where it could find down of the finest quality, just right for feathering a nest.
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About the Author
Daughter of two Cuban political exiles, M.C.A. Hogarth was born a foreigner in the American melting pot and has had a fascination for the gaps in cultures and the bridges that span them ever since. She has been many things—web database architect, product manager, technical writer and massage therapist—but is currently a full-time parent, artist, writer and anthropologist to aliens, both human and otherwise.
A Rosary of Stones and Thorns is only one of the author's many stories. To pick out your next read, visit the “Where Do I Start?” page on the author’s website. You can also sign up for her quarterly newsletter to be notified of new releases.
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