My hands burned, seared by the throne that threatened to blind me and melt down my wings, but still I held on. I was strong, strong and weightless, as though I had come from a place with five times the gravity of this one. And there was Lucifer, spanning the heavens above me, his light so bright now that the wings of the others were nearly translucent with it, their bodies white conflagrations so that I thought, We, too, are transformed. And I was broken by gratitude that I should feel kinship with that splendid creature—a new and marvelous identity that swelled my immortal chest.
I wasn’t the only one. I clamored with equally awed seraphim and archangels, their hands grappling with mine. We had witnessed his glory. We had bent the knee. I could no sooner turn back than I could annul the oath of my allegiance. I had undone the contentment of my prior existence with words and acts irrevocable.
We sped heavenward, drawn up after Lucifer like a magnet, inspired by a single will—his. The cosmos had shrunk to this: the expanse of his wings blotting out the sky, his brilliance diminishing the stars, the great power of his ascent piercing its way to heaven.
But then something happened. The higher we flew, the closer we approached the summit of the mount of God, the more a sense of inevitability crept over me. It crawled like plague through my body, settled like ache in my bones. I told myself that I was simply in unfamiliar territory; only Lucifer himself had ascended so high, to stand in the throne room of the Almighty.
But no, it was more than that. Something was wrong. I felt naked, even in glory.
Now, with the corporate thrum of our wings in my ears, I noticed strange things: seraphim regarded me jealously. One of them even pulled at my hands to wrest them from the throne. I knew what he was doing, and I was filled with rage. That seraph would seek higher favor with Lucifer by assuming my better hold on the throne! It didn’t matter that he was my superior—this was the anarchy of ambition and I felt no loyalty to rank order. I hated him, and though I had never before raised a hand against anyone, I tore at his wing, ripping it.
He clawed at me, face contorted, fingers biting like talons until I let go with a howl, unable to match him. But I was insane with rage and pursued him, clinging to his feet, pulling at him, wanting him to fall. I cursed him with new and foreign words. Unholy words. And now the others around us were clamoring, too, each determined to find favor above his fellow with this new god, jealous of those closest to him, resentment plain in their eyes. Revolt, glorious to us before, had sprung full-grown and hideous from our hearts. Our fervor, our ambition, careened into violence. And the higher we ascended the worse it became until there wasn’t an angel without menace on his face, no seraph without pride in his better strength, no archangel without possession in his eyes.
We had found a new order, appointed our god, and brought chaos to the world.
The stars wouldn’t abide it. Before we could ascend beyond the second heaven, the sky flashed. I felt anger again, but it wasn’t mine. This anger was righteous, so different from that chaos permeating our knot of rebels. The Host was upon us. I recognized faces I had once loved. In the dream I knew them. And I was struck by their pure, sanctified power. They outnumbered us, and for the first time I felt the force of their strength—a strength I had once been a part of. I saw the hands of kin raised against me, and I feared for myself.
And then I feared even more because I had never before been afraid.
The throne fell from our hands and dropped through the tangle of our arms and wings and heads, plummeting away, a radiant speck in a blackening sea. I watched for a horrified moment, the bellow of Lucifer loud in my ears as the golden throne grew smaller and smaller. And then it was gone, fallen back to Eden.
In the dream I was so familiar with early Eden that I could picture the throne there, shattered among the shining stones of forgotten harmony, the physical wreck of our plan. But when I looked, Eden, that land of brightness, had gone dark. I could see no mote of light there at all. Careening from those heights, fleeing for the lower heavens away from the hands of the Host arrayed before the third heaven, I realized that the only source of light at all was Lucifer. Where were the bright stones of that garden, the great refracted brilliance of our prince, even from this distance?
I had never seen the earth from so far away, had never looked down on it like this. Even so, I knew something was horribly wrong. And then I saw shadow engulfing the land, covering it like ink, rising up over it and creeping across the earth until it had seemingly digested it whole, the garden drowned by a sea of pitch.
My world had gone as dark as a planet covered by a shroud, the black cloak of what we had done blotting out everything else.
Lucifer veered away from the onslaught of the angels and I woke as the rebels, having nowhere else to go, took after him. I saw him through the loosening fibers of sleep, leading them away: a bright light trailing stars, a comet and its sparkling tail.
In the space of a night, the ambition for heaven and darkness of Eden had become more real to me than my own home, than the tangled sheets of my bed. The face of that seraph was more horrific than any terror conceived of my own mind. I smelled the brine of sweat, felt its grime on my arms. Never had I experienced emotion in such terrible, pure form. Not even in the torture of facing an unfaithful spouse.
Perhaps this was his revenge for my walking out of the tea shop. If it was, I had no way to confront him, no knowledge—if I had ever had any—of when I would encounter him again.
The next morning, as I sat at my desk, erratic script emerging from my pen, I was seized by a thought. Opening my laptop, I turned it on and pulled up my schedule.
10:30 P.M.: L.
12:00 A.M.: L.
And again, in blocks between 1:00 A.M. until 4:00 A.M.:
L.
L.
L.