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The dark stone room is what I see again while I sleep. It will never leave me alone. It will always be there, haunting me, never letting me forget what I had to endure to come back. This time, Emmanuel stands in front of me with his whip in his hands and a malevolent smile on his face.
"I promise, my dear, you will cave in to me eventually. You'll break, or submit, but you won't win." He sounds far too pleased with himself. I try to move, but my hands are chained to the ground in front of me and I'm paralyzed regardless.
My eyes close as his arm goes up. I hear the sound of the whip cracking, but unlike the grim reality I relive every night, there is no pain this time. Instead, my hands free themselves from the chains as I look up to see Ast standing in front of me with the coil of the whip curled around her hand.
All at once, the vision changes as her voice echoes around me, though I can't hear her words. The stone room disappears, and in its place is a hallway with windows on one side and doors on the other. Outside the windows is Purgatory as haunting as ever, covered in the Neutrality fog, like it was before I started to fix it. She turns to me with a solemn tear on her cheek. She helps me up and pulls me into a tight hug I never want to leave. If I had a mother, I think this is what it would have felt like, and I have never needed it more.
"I'm sorry." Ast says into my ear. "I could have stopped this. None of it had to happen, but I was selfish. I see that now."
"Not your fault." I mutter. She pulls away from me, her face determined.
"You aren't done fighting yet. I'm here now to fill in the blanks, so you understand everything, so you can finish what we all started."
"What do you mean?"
"Behind these doors are my memories." She gestures behind her to the hallway. "Things I should have shown you in the beginning. They're not in order, but I think seeing it this way will help. Maybe if you understand what happened before, you'll understand what needs to be done now."
"Why now?"
"I was waiting until you were strong enough. It is clear no one else can or will end this for good." She frowns. "Come on, I won't let you wake up until we're done." We walk past many, many doors in silence before she finally stops in front of one. "Emmanuel and I were created together before anything else existed. We were experiments for God. He had no idea what he was doing when he made us, and he ended up making us too much like him."
"Does that make the two of you..."
"Being a God wasn't for me, but yes, we are also Gods." Ast gives me a small smile. "When our God started creating other things, Emmanuel felt slighted. He wanted to be enough on his own and he couldn't see how great the new things were. He was selfish. When we were given Purgatory so we could rule over the humans, Emmanuel reached his breaking point. Then, this happened."
She lets the door swing open. Looking inside, I see what is clearly Purgatory but it is bright and the fog is nowhere to be seen. Here, in the dream space Ast occupies, the light doesn't hurt me. Emmanuel and Ast are in a large throne room with two tall chairs in front of beautiful stained-glass like in the library of Heaven. I recognize this room with a distinct fear as a room in a castle nestled deep within Purgatory where Emmanuel held me and where he still resides.
"We are here to protect the humans!" Memory Ast, a younger and less tired looking woman, reminds me of myself. Emmanuel towers over her the way he towers over me, leering like he wants nothing more than to hear screams of pain.
"Protect them, or preoccupy ourselves so we don't notice we have been completely cast aside in their favor?" He looks ready to attack her.
"This is important! We're important! What's wrong with you that you can't see that?"
"I can see that you're happy being nothing in a land of nothing, with these creatures that are less than nothing." He literally spits at her feet. "You're where you belong, but not me."
"I never understood what he was thinking." The present Ast next to me sighs as she shuts the door on the memory. "The humans we watched over were wonderful. They loved being there, and I loved being among them. No two were alike; everything was different and exciting." She smiles at the recollection.
"I know what he did." I say.
"No, you were told what he did. But you don't know." She brushes away another tear and leads me several more doors down. The door she stops at this time is darker than the others. I can hear screaming behind it even before she opens it, which she does without an explanation.
The scene is, in one word, sickening. I don't see people, I see corpses filling the streets of Purgatory. The pavement runs with blood and ash rains down from the fire raging through the Realm. In the distance, I can hear pained screaming like mine from the stone room. My stomach churns at the sight of Ast on her knees. She is looking at her hands covered in the blood of the humans with horror and devastation on her face. In front of her is Emmanuel, smiling, standing in the midst of the complete chaos.
"You wanted beauty? Here. This is your beauty when it meets mine. This is what we were meant for, my sister. You love them, and I love their destruction. It's what they deserve for ruining us. It's what we were made for!"
The door slams shut even though neither of us touch it. Ast is crying silently next to me, but I don't think I could ever comfort her. That's not something you can console away. That was everything she cared about, set ablaze by someone she cared about.
"The kids never knew the extent of what happened in Purgatory, so I'm not surprised you don't know. Lucifer never talked about it, I expect he still doesn't." She ushers me away from the door as she speaks.
"The kids?"
"Lilith's children." Ast smiles through her tears, pushing away her pain. "She birthed children for God on Earth and he decided where they would go, until she met Lucifer. She became too independent for Earth, so Lucifer was tasked with bringing her back. She and I became friends the moment we met. She had a lot of children with a lot of different beings, some with God himself... but Lucifer was always her favorite. They were good for each other."
"Kal was the youngest, right?"
"He and Michael were born so close together, they could have been twins. They were very close growing up. Si was always watching them like a third parent. Lucifer smiled a lot back then." She laughs. I do too, just thinking about it. "I loved them like I would have loved my own children."
"What really happened to Lilith?" I'm not even sure I want the answer. Lucifer talking about her showed me how much she was loved, but also how much her death affected those around them. Does anyone love me enough to build a statue in my likeness? Even Ast never got that.
"To understand what happened, you have to know why it happened. I truly believe this was the catalyst for everything." She opens another door, this time it is in Heaven. It looks like the hall where the dance was held the night everything started.
The memory of Ast is standing with Lucifer behind an enraged Lilith, who is confronting Emmanuel. I've only ever seen the statue of her in the square, and though that depicts her as beautiful, it did not capture her as clearly as I had anticipated. She is obviously where Kal gets his eyes and temper, though she is taller than Lucifer with wild red hair braided close to the sides of her head. Her ears are adorned with jewelry that look like Michael's golden wings.
"How dare you try to corrupt my son!" she yells, ready to attack Emmanuel herself. Lucifer tries to calm her down but it doesn't work. She marches herself right up to Emmanuel, who does not look amused. "If I find out you ever lay another hand on my boy, I will hunt you down and take care of you myself!"
"My dear," he says as if he were bored of the conversation, "I am not a being to threaten if you enjoy your existence as it is."
"If you so much as look at Asmodeus again—"
"Yes, yes, you're a scary little human. Why don't you go now and do what you're best at? You'll need to work on a replacement soon." Emmanuel laughs. The whole scene freezes, literally freezes, when Lilith slaps Emmanuel across the face as hard as she can. For a human, she would pack no real physical punch, but I know Emmanuel well enough at this point to know the real damage would have been to his ego, and that's worse. Ast closes the door with a soft click, staring at her long-lost friend before she is gone again.
"I don't want to see her dead again." She says. Her voice shakes and so do her fingers on the handle. "I was the one who found her. He made sure of it because I—"
"I don't need to see it." I take her hand and move it off the brass. "I've seen what Emmanuel does to people. I-I believe you that it was bad."
"I loved her. She was my family." Ast wipes her face off and sniffles. "I barely recognized her."
"I understand. I have... someone like that, too." Danny's face flashes in my mind. I touch Ast's shoulder in a weak show of solidarity and she takes one long stabilizing breath.
"After we found Lilith, the Rulers at the time came together to discuss what we should do. We never had to face anything like Emmanuel before. Lucifer and Michael weren't in the positions they have now, so they didn't really have a say. This was before the Fall, before things got as bad as they did."
"But if he burned Purgatory and killed Lilith..."
"They told me that they would persuade him to be one of us again. I believed that it was possible. I used to believe beings like him could be saved." She sighs bitterly as we move to another door.
"Where was God during all of this? Where is he now?"
"Gone." She shrugs. "After he created Earth for the humans, he distanced himself from all of us. No explanation. Only the highest Rulers could speak with him directly, but even they were ignored after a while."
"No one told me we could talk to him."
"Being able to speak to him doesn't mean we get a response. Unfortunately, not punishing Emmanuel made him see he could do whatever he wanted. Since I didn't follow his ideologies, he decided that I didn't need to have the power he thought he could use better. He couldn't fight me himself, he'd lose to me in a physical fight, so..."
"He got to Kal instead, because he was an easy target and you loved him."
"And I failed Lilith." Her face pales. "I can't watch this one, either. This was how the Fall started. When my sweet boy..." She stops in front of a door slightly different from the others. This one is darker than the rest, changed like her memory of Purgatory burning. "I don't want to watch him make that mistake again."
"You don't have to, but I need to understand what happened. He won't tell me, no one will."
"I'll wait a bit further down." She pats my shoulder before she walks away. I turn back to the door and take a deep breath before I open it to see Kal in, not really a solid space, but more like the black Abyss I've become too acquainted with. Instead of pure darkness, this place is pure light, though some parts of it must be solid. Kal stands with Michael and Ast behind him.
"Talk to me!" Kal demands in a pained, rage-filled scream as he stares up at something I can't see, although his eyes are fixed.
"Asmodeus, stop this!" Ast pleads with him. "This isn't going to end the way you want it to!"
"No! He's going to answer me!" Kal doesn't take his eyes off of whatever, or whoever, he's glaring at. "Why would you make us all completely unequal from each other? From you? You have the power to stop this! You can fix everything if you want to! Why did you make us all the way we are if you weren't going to love us?"
"Asmodeus..." Michael doesn't sound so bent on pleading with Kal, but more like he's trying to reason with him. "This isn't what you want. You know you're loved as much as any of us are."
"No, Emmanuel showed me the truth. He's not loved, and neither am I, because we don't fall into line like the rest of you. My own father wants nothing to do with me! You want nothing to do with me!" He turns back to whatever is above them and yells to the white Abyss, "And God wants nothing to do with any of us!"
"Sweetie, you know that isn't true." Ast places her hand on his shoulder, but he is rough when he pushes her away, and she falls to their feet.
"Don't you get it?" He turns his glare to her. "God created you and then left you, he left my mom, he left all of us behind, even his precious humans! And then he let them all burn in front of you, because he doesn't care."
"You don't mean any of this," Michael yells, "God had nothing to do with mom, or what happened in Purgatory. You should be angry with Emmanuel, not God!"
"What would you know?" Kal snaps back. "You're everyone's favorite and I'm just the screw up! You have no idea what it feels like to be the last choice even in your own family!"
"You're no one's last choice!" Ast cries. "You're not my last choice, my sweet boy. I love you!"
"Not as much as you love Heath, a fucking human, and not as much as you love the rest of the humans." Kal returns his gaze upwards. My heart sinks, knowing something is coming. "None of this would have happened if they had never been created."
"Watch what you're saying!" Michael nervously looks from Kal to where I assume God is.
"I know exactly what I'm saying." Kal snarls. "Emmanuel was right, humans are better off eradicated. Emmanuel knows how to do it. Do you hear me, God? You can't ignore us anymore! We're going to destroy the only thing you care about, so maybe then you'll pay attention!"
Memory Ast screams as the white room turns black in the blink of an eye. The door shuts abruptly on its own, and I'm left staring at the wood inches from my face with tears staining my cheeks. In all the time I had imagined how Kal could have caused the Fall, I had never pictured that. He was no better than a child, and in so much pain that he damned everyone with him.
Eager to get away from the memory, I quickly return to Ast's side at a new door. It's the second to last in the hallway, and she looks worn out now, like she was reliving the memories instead of only viewing them with me.
"This one is a memory we share." She offers up a small smile. "I know you have questions as to why I picked you to take my place. This is the answer. This is why things are the way they are now."
She doesn't let me ask any questions. She pushes the door open, and inside is the street in front of the library in Purgatory, lonely and desolate as it is now, the fog a light blanket over the Realm. This is clearly post-destruction, post-Fall, and it looks more recent than anything else I've seen. Ast in the memory is crying and bleeding from her chest, struggling to stand, and Kal has her blood on his hands.
"You could have fought back. I don't want you to die, why didn't you fight me? He told me you'd fight back!" Kal's voice is shaky and breaks under the weight of the situation. She chokes on her own blood as she falls to her knees. Kal rushes forward to catch her before she can hit the pavement, and holds her close. She looks up at him and I can see the moment Kal realizes she’s not walking away from this.
"I can't... hurt you." She is straining to speak now.
"You're all I have left, Ast, please tell me what to do! How do I fix this?!"
"You"—she chokes on blood that trails down her chin and throat—"you can't."
"I'm sorry! Ast, I'm so sorry. I love you, please, don't leave me alone! I can fix this. I swear, just tell me what to do!" he yells, and like I'm there with him, I can feel his pain in my own soul.
I don't think she can speak anymore. Instead, she uses all the strength she has left to take Kal's hand and bring it with her own to cover the fatal wound. Thin little coils of Neutrality appear over their hands. The energy begins to radiate from the wound and cover her entire body like a cocoon. Kal sets her down but doesn't move from her side or take his hand away from her as she becomes pure Neutrality in a vaguely person-like shape. Then, as if blown by a gentle breeze, it floats up and back into the air. Left in its wake, where Ast had lain down to accept her fate... is me.
I don't know what to think as Ast closes the door and lets me soak up what I just saw. After I turn to her, neither crying nor smiling, she sighs and pulls me in for another tight hug.
"I used what energy I had left to create you. I knew you could do better than me. I gave you what I hoped was a chance at a life I never got."
"I didn't know you could create life. I didn't know anyone could."
"Of course, I could. I was a God. You are, too. This is why Emmanuel wants you so badly. I was the one gifted with that ability, to balance him out. All my powers are yours."
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do now. I'm not strong enough to go out there and defeat him. I'm scared. I can't face him again, not after—"
"You can. You're stronger than you have any right to be. You'll know when it's time, and you won't be alone." She smiles, soft. "I'll always be with you."