Fall From Grace Read online

  Genesis opened its mouth and brightened the esophagus with a column of light. Far below Michael, the beast’s stomach was filled with digestive acids. Genesis swallowed, the muscles in its throat rolling with the intake of air to push down debris…and angels. They tumbled past Michael, reaching out for him before splashing into the corrosive pool. The acid dissolved through the layers of their skin and muscle like anatomical erosion.

  An angel fell near Michael and latched onto his leg. “Help me! Pull me up!”

  Michael removed a hand from Excalibur, but the angel was out of reach. He strained his arm down, dislocating his shoulder with a pop, until the tips of his fingers interlocked with the angel’s in an unstable grip.

  “Reach up with your other arm.”

  “I can’t. I’ll fall. I can’t!”

  “I will not drop you. Let go of my leg and grab my wrist,” Michael said. The angel released him and groped at the air. “You can do it. Stay calm and reach higher. Almost there.”

  “Don’t let me go!” The angel cried…then clamped onto his wrist. “The Creator is good. The Creator is good—”

  Another body plummeted and knocked him off Michael.

  The angel tumbled down the shaft and dropped into the stomach, his terrified eyes locked on Michael until they melted from his skull. The bones floated among others like stew stock.

  Genesis closed its mouth, extinguishing the light. A final swallow pushed through the esophagus and loosened Excalibur. Michael reset his shoulder and jammed the blade in, but the healing moisture was too slippery. The sword slid out, plunging him towards the steaming stomach.

  Michael bounced between the gummy walls in a wild spin that his wings could not correct, scraping Excalibur against the edges but unable to slow his descent…

  A hand snagged one of Michael’s wings, suspending him above the acid. Bubbles burst up, trying to splash his feet as if angry to be denied another victim. Michael was pulled through the upper stomach wall into a cave carved out in spongy tissue.

  “Michael? Is that you?”

  Cassiel stepped into Excalibur’s light, alive, but his body was severely disfigured. His hair was singed to ragged patches on a flaking scalp, and the feathers of his wings were disintegrated down to the muscle. It was a feat of sheer willpower that he yet drew breath.

  “Cassiel? How?” Michael asked, stupefied.

  “When the Behemoth…I clung to its stomach walls, but the acid splashed up as it moved. The pain, the pain was…” The memory made Cassiel’s wounds flare. “Then its body began to change. I saw an opening and hid in here. I heard others fall. I tried to reach for them. I tried to save them, Michael. I tried.”

  “You did all one could ask of an angel. Of a Seraph.”

  “It was not enough,” Cassiel said. “How did this happen to you? What of Heaven?”

  “Much has transpired, but now is not the time to speak of it. Can you move?”

  Under the light of Excalibur’s flames, Cassiel saw the dismal condition of his body. “By the Creator…I, I cannot fly, but yes, I am mobile.”

  “Then we are leaving this carcass together.”

  Michael stabbed Excalibur into the porous tissue surrounding them. Cassiel pulled him away from the wall as greasy, barbed pincers shot out from the organ to strike at the threat.

  “This body has many defenses.” Cassiel held up a crooked hand missing two fingers.

  “I will not be digested,” Michael insisted. “Where are we? What are our options?”

  “The anatomy seems very similar to ours. This is the spleen, best I can tell.” Cassiel put his ear against the spleen wall. “I can hear its lungs expanding in the cavity beyond. If we could breach through and locate the pulmonary vein—”

  “—We could ride the blood stream to its heart. Destroy the source.”

  “But its organs are as large as buildings. It would fight to eliminate any threat before you could reach the lungs…unless something else—someone else—held its attention.”

  “No. Unacceptable,” Michael said. “The Thrones will get you healed up.”

  “Look at me. What can a Throne do? I am already dead,” Cassiel replied with sober acceptance. “The Creator allowed me to linger on this world for one purpose: to see you onward. I am blessed. Until we are reunited, Michael, in another life.”

  Cassiel snapped two bones off his wings to use as jagged swords and hacked at the opposite wall, shredding the tissue. The pincers lashed out, but he held them back.

  “Go! GO!”

  The decision was out of Michael’s hands. He dug Excalibur into the spleen and cut open a passage. With a final look back, he saw the pincers coil around Cassiel and absorb him into the wall. Cassiel kept fighting even as the wounds sealed shut around him.

  In another life. Pass well, Brother.

  Michael pointed Excalibur ahead and sprinted, parting the spleen until he broke into the open cavity of Genesis’ torso. The passage he carved healed instantly, no more than a pinprick in the giant organ.

  A gargantuan lung was suspended above Michael like a mountain of honeycombs, expanding and depressing as Genesis breathed. He flew up through scattered muck and landed on a gelatinous cliff to scale the lung. Each inhalation shook Michael, but he did not dare pierce the organ with Excalibur and discover what other means the beast’s body had to purge foreign objects. He thought about how every creature in Heaven came from the building blocks of Genesis’ cells. It was a miracle of Creation and evolution, a synthesis of planned design and natural selection. The lung quivered—could Genesis sense him? Best not to linger.

  Michael climbed the alpine lung one moist grip after another, swaying with Genesis’ movements. At last, a hefty, bluish tube sprouted from the tissue—the pulmonary vein. He heard the blood rushing through it towards the heart. Slowly, surgically, Michael used Excalibur to open a slit in the vein. The current within was more intense than any frothing rapids in Heaven.

  Michael held his breath and dove into the vein. The flow of blood rushed him through head over heels in a nauseating loss of direction, but a dominant THUMP THUMP drew nearer.

  The vein dumped Michael into the meaty atrium of Genesis’ heart. The muscle pounded and forced him through a sequence of valves, bones bruising with each thudding collision. He had to hurry or be pushed back through the beast’s circulatory system.

  Between thumps, Michael saw the primary source of blood flow: the aorta. He was about to commit a mortal sin against Heaven, against Mother Nature, against the Creator, but his duty to the Host superseded all else. If Genesis were allowed to live, the Host would perish.

  Unfortunately, his choice was that simple.

  Michael thrust Excalibur into the aorta. He flapped his wings to propel around the circumference and saw through the dense tissue. Genesis thrashed as he circled again and again, cutting deeper until the aorta severed. Blood spewed into the heart like a broken dam. The duress made the muscle pump faster, but it only accelerated Genesis’ demise. Michael slashed through the chamber and back into the chest cavity.

  An ocean of blood gushed throughout Genesis’ torso and drowned its organs. The body began to shut down in a chaotic collapse of every system. Michael soared between its ribcage, dodging the hot geysers, and cleaved the inner flesh of Genesis’ chest—

  Excalibur pierced through to the outside world. Michael spread the wound and pulled himself to freedom like a crimson parasite, repulsed by what he had done. His self-loathing was soon replaced by the unmistakable sensation of falling.

  Genesis was plummeting out of the sky.

  Michael sailed off the body just before it crashed onto the borders of Shehaqim, stamping a crater that fractured the plate of geologic crust beneath. Genesis began to separate into the Behemoth and Leviathan. Michael flew onto its degenerating face and placed a hand on its forehead. Genesis would not die alone. If Michael could provide it even a shred of comfort, he owed that much.

  “My deepest apologies, Genesis, but I s
erve the Creator and the Host. We have much more to accomplish in Creation before our lives conclude.”

  “You have true power, angel,” Genesis replied in a whisper that carried like the wind. “If Heaven has any future, it rests with you. Will you assume the mantle of Heaven’s sentinel?”

  “I will. By all the grace that we share, I vow to save Heaven.”

  Genesis closed its eyes and passed from the world. Upon its death, a cacophony of cries echoed across the region. Birds hit the ground. Grazers keeled over. Insects ceased buzzing. All around, the animals were dying. Soon, angels and demons would be the only entities still alive in Heaven.

  A horse trotted across the wilted field towards Michael, trying to outrun death, but it became more emaciated with each clop. The front legs gave out and dropped the horse onto its chest. Michael held its head in his lap and ran his fingers through the coarse, dry mane. The horse whinnied, not understanding what was happening. It was so afraid.

  “There is nothing to fear where you are going, no pain, only endless fields to run across with all of your brothers and sisters. You have done nothing wrong. Nothing at all.”

  Because of the war, Michael had caused Heaven irreparable harm—the same accusation he once made of Satanail. If the angels were to survive, they had to prove their right to live. They had to earn Creation’s forgiveness, even if it took the remainder of their existence. Guiding Mankind would be the Host’s eternal penance. Nothing else remained to fight for. Nothing.

  The war for Heaven had reached its zenith and was about to come crashing down on all of them.

  Satan was unsure what to feel as he watched Michael burst out of Genesis’ stinking corpse. Should he be happy that his rival was still alive and that the opportunity remained to face him? When Mammon said that Michael had died, nothing mattered except confirming it with his own eyes. The rebellion, reclaiming Araboth, Mankind and Earth—it was all expelled from his thoughts. Without Michael, Satan couldn’t bring himself to care about why he was fighting.

  The war made Michael grow powerful in ways Satan never conceived. He offered the only challenge that remained among the Host. As it was in the beginning, the fate of Heaven would come down to Satan and Michael. The worst punishment Father could endure would be to witness his original sons fight to the death with every world hanging in the balance.

  Satan couldn’t wait to see how it would all unfold.

  CHAPTER 26

  The Calm Before the Storm

  The flight back to Araboth was devastating for Michael. Passing over the regions of Heaven felt like a sweeping aggregation of everything that had gone so terribly afoul despite his constant, debilitating efforts to see it otherwise. A radial creep of decay from the expired Tree of Life shriveled all vegetation into brittle fossils. Packs of prostrate animal corpses were smattered across the blackened lands. Rotting sea creatures washed ashore and turned the coastline into a rank necropolis. Even the motion of microscopic organisms had ceased. Not one instrument remained to play the symphony of Heaven’s ecosystem.

  As Michael approached Araboth City, the debauchery of Limbo carried across the plains like a garish bacchanalia held in honor of the mass extinction. The obscenity wracked him with a desire to slice into the sacrilegious shantytown and quell every demonic voice. But self-indulgent wrath would not return the eons of evolution lost when Michael cut down Genesis.

  News of Michael’s arrival spread like a healing wildfire that burned through the city’s dismay. Throngs of angels praised the Creator, believing his resurrection a divine blessing. The city was packed to capacity, harboring millions of Michael’s homeless brothers, but he thought of the millions more in hiding that waited for liberation or death. Father, protect them but a while longer.

  I promise you, Heaven’s blight draws to a close.

  Gabriel flew to Michael and almost knocked him over with a hug, relieved to rescind his command. “I was sure we lost you.”

  “Heaven paid a steep price for my return.”

  “You did what was necessary.”

  “An excuse I have long since exhausted.”

  “Flog yourself later. The demonic legions are gathering for a definitive assault,” Gabriel said, pointing towards Limbo. “The Host awaits your orders.”

  Orders…everyone looking to me…needing me.

  “Have Uriel begin implementing the Merkabah Project and coordinate with the Dominions to mobilize our army into battle formations. Have all those unable to fight assigned to the city’s defenses,” Michael rattled off, but his dour mind was elsewhere.

  “This is the end, Michael. Our victory approaches.”

  “History will not record any of our actions as a victory.”

  Michael flew for the Sanctuary to speak his final valediction.

  Michael entered the Throne Room and nearly slipped on puddles of blood and glass splashed across the shattered floor. The Elders were hacked into pieces and arranged in a malicious mosaic of viscera, their severed heads pegged into the wall like busts. The slaughter replayed in Michael’s mind like a heartless, vindictive story written in gore specifically for him and signed with pleasure by its author.

  Satan had been here.

  Michael flew down into the empty Chamber of Creation and found the golden throne, its luster dull and cracked. Satan had not risked capture solely to kill the Elders. Such transparency was beneath him. Satan craved recognition from the Creator, even if it were condemnation, but may have interpreted His truancy and silence as favor. Why permit Satan to terrorize Heaven when Father could cease the violence with a thought? If He was still punishing the Host, had they not suffered enough?

  Since the first words of rebellion stunned Heaven, Michael had been ensnared in a web of questions. He expended so much faith tangling with the “why” of it all, but the piece of him that tried to understand Satan’s intentions—or Father’s—had to be discarded. Michael would receive no enlightenment, no convenient solution to halt the war before its bloody culmination. Satan had accessed the Chamber, which meant that he discovered the gateway. His lust for conquest would never be satiated with Heaven.

  Michael and the angels were Mankind’s last line of defense.

  “Father? Wherever you are, I pray that these words reach you. The responsibility you have entrusted to me…the lives and souls…I should have done more. I should have found another path to peace. Some call me Seraph, others the Logos or Archon, but I am only one angel. Though my flaws and sins are many, they are my own. I still trust in the Host. I trust that this war can be won. But no matter our fate, Mankind will not bleed for our transgressions. If every angel in Heaven must perish to protect them, then so be it. We have had our time. Mankind will have theirs.”

  Excalibur’s flames encompassed the blade like a blazing star igniting in the Cosmos. “Now and forever, I am your loyal son.”

  Satan’s strategy was almost complete, each precise element combining like a chemical formula ready for combustion. He poured over parchments of battle formations and attack routes while his generals mobilized the legions. The demons harvested the rotting corpses of Heaven’s animals for food, growing more feral with each bite. Their bodies had developed orifices to expel waste—an animalistic act foreign to their original physiology. Satan’s wild children were now more akin to the Forgotten than angels…and primed for bloodshed.

  Satan longed to leave the muck of Limbo behind and torch it to ash alongside the remains of his enemies. The impulse to unleash his demons on a rampage was tantalizing, but sacking Araboth was no small feat. It’d be asinine to allow his reason to lapse after all his success. Even in the most optimistic scenario, losses would be immense on both sides. It was unavoidable but not entirely regrettable. Heaven had become overcrowded with winged pests.

  “Lord Satan,” Mammon called from outside the tent.

  “Enter.”

  Mammon dragged an angel inside, badly beaten but glaring daggers at Satan. “He flew into our borders alone and unarmed. C
laimed to have a message for you from Michael.”

  “Leave him,” Satan ordered. “That will be all, General.”

  “You are a disgrace. A pox on your soul,” the angel said to Mammon, earning a kick to his temple before the general exited.

  Satan unsheathed Wormwood and pressed the tip of the blade between the angel’s eyes. Not a flinch. He would’ve made a model demon. “What’s your name, angel?”

  “Fanuel.”

  “Fanuel…Fanuel, you were a Virtue, correct?” Satan asked. That would explain the animosity towards Mammon.

  “Upon a time. Now, I am a warrior of the Host.” Fanuel’s chest puffed with pride. Grit.

  “So it seems. Did Michael order you to deliver his message?”

  “I volunteered.”

  “Did you? You must’ve known it would mean your life.”

  Satan pressed Wormwood’s blade through the first layers of skin. A drop of blood trickled down the bridge of Fanuel’s nose.

  “It is my honor to die in service of the Creator.”

  “Then speak and be so honored.”

  “The Logos and Archon wishes to meet with you before your kind is crushed and the curdled memory of your heresy purged from Heaven,” Fanuel recited.

  “Bold words, though I think you’ve added a dash of spice,” Satan said with another poke. “Why send you when Michael could’ve visited himself? Seems a waste of a good angel, no?”

  “He will not meet you here or in Araboth City but at the ‘summit of tradition.’ He said you would understand. I do not share his faith in your intelligence,” Fanuel taunted.

  “Be still my heart, you’re a salty one.” Satan found Fanuel immensely entertaining. Not enough to spare his life, but entertaining nonetheless. “Your mission is complete, Fanuel of the Host’s army. I understand and accept Michael’s invitation.”