Lucifer came to the mortal realm far less than it was believed. It wasn't that he didn’t enjoy his time when he came—he certainly did. The mortal realm was by far the greatest creation that the Almighty had ever formed. Even he had to admit that. Well, it was perhaps a close second, when you considered humanity itself. Both of His greatest creations, placed together and allowed to run free. It was a marvel, truly.
Yet, when he visited too often or for too long, a darkness always threatened to pass over him. The desolate valleys of Hell could not compete with the despair that filled him when he lingered on Earth. While this world was not exactly the same one he had once walked through freely, it was similar in many ways. To see how far mankind had come, and how far it still had yet to progress, always filled him with a bleak memory of the past and a curious sadness about the future.
“Brother.”
So distracted by his thoughts, he hadn’t noticed the arrival of another of the Fallen. Asmodeus was reflected in the window he stood before, the devilishly handsome angel peering at him with thinly-veiled surprise. It wasn’t like Lucifer to allow himself to be approached as such, and silently he chided himself for not being more aware of his surroundings. It was unlikely that he was going to be found, even if the Host had puzzled out his involvement in recent events. Yet, it wouldn’t do to be discovered and banished back to Hell where they claimed he belonged.
He turned to Asmodeus, swirling the liquor and ice cubes in the glass held lightly in his hand. “I assume more has happened?”
Asmodeus was still staring at him, though the surprise was wiped from his face. Angels, even fallen ones, were eternal beings. His brother was still as handsome as he had always been, silver eyes matching wonderfully with the deep black of his hair. His time alongside the Fallen had done nothing to mar the well-formed body or the eager light that now shone behind his gaze.
“They have taken him.”
“And Tobias?”
“Fled back to his kin, he sleeps dreamlessly as we speak. He told her everything.”
Lucifer nodded. “Good. He is where he needs to be, then.”
“Would retrieving him be our next step?”
“No, we have been playing our parts as carefully as possible. There is no need to come for him when he will find us himself. Or, rather, he will find his way to me.”
“You are sure?”
“As sure as I can be, which is fairly sure.”
“You see more than I do, for all I see is chaos.”
Lucifer set the tinkling glass aside as he smiled. “And what is it exactly that you see?”
Now the dark-haired angel looked uncomfortable, not wishing to insult his eldest brother so casually. Lucifer motioned for him to speak openly, having never discouraged any of them to impart their opinions, from the moment they chose to follow him into the first rebellion. He may very well have been the first of the Fallen, and some claimed in the beginning that he was the best, but he had never wanted to drag them with him unwillingly. They fell with him because they chose to follow, because they had believed as he had. To be an effective leader, he needed to know where his brethren stood. If Asmodeus was willing to speak up, then there were plenty of others who mirrored his thoughts.
“All I see, all the others can see, is a randomly chosen human and a lost angel. You knew about them before even their watchers knew. You kept us from interfering when it seemed that Azrael would give up in the beginning, when he should have given it up, when he realized the error of his actions. You kept us from sabotaging Gabriel and Raphael from tracking them, while Azrael and Tobias somehow managed to stay a step ahead in their travels. We know that you watched them in Detroit, and you just tracked them down again in Vermont. Yet, you have restrained us to only watching them and tracking anomalies in the world, and before that, you had us watching Azrael as covertly as possible for decades. The only direct interference you allowed us was causing some unknown woman to forget she knew Tobias, while making sure that a picture from some newsletter in that town he lived outside of made its way to an online art periodical. Your decisions on what to do or not do are obfuscated from us, and you seem to be choosing acts at random, relying on luck.”
Through the entirety of the monologue, Lucifer nodded encouragingly, eventually picking up his half-filled glass and seating himself. The sound of the streets below was muffled by both distance and the wall of thick glass that faced it, providing the faint background noise of humanity among Asmodeus's words. He couldn’t help but feel a smug sense of satisfaction as he listened to his brother’s confused and conflicted questions. If the very people to whom he had assigned a few tasks could not decipher his actions, then their heavenly brethren were even more lost.
“Do you feel better, getting that off your chest?”
Asmodeus frowned down at him. “Do not patronize me.”
“Oh, I’m not, I assure you. You hardly took a breath throughout it all, so I wonder how long you, and the others, have been restraining yourself from saying anything to me. I would have hoped that after all we have gone through, and my repeated attempts to dissuade the lot of you from holding your tongues, I would have made some progress there, but alas.”
“We do not wish to question your every decision, brother. You have led us well in the past, and we don’t want to call that into question.”
“Yes, I led you so well, right into the depths of Hell.”
“You led us, held us together in our unified belief. The fact that our belief plunged us from our place in Heaven is no fault of your own. We all knew the potential cost of what we did, and we chose it anyway. You must stop punishing yourself for the end result we all knew could come.”
They both knew this conversation would go nowhere. As furious as Lucifer had been at their holy siblings and at their maker Himself, it couldn’t hold a candle to the guilt he possessed. There was not a day that went by when he did not chide himself for not doing better, and for not fighting harder. Many told him, time and time again, that there was nothing he could do and that when the Almighty made up His mind, it was set. He knew this, of course. Had he not been there before them, after all? Yet, he would never be able to rid himself of the idea that there might have been something he could have said—could have done—that might have spared them their fates.
Those thoughts had tormented him for eons, which he imagined was the point. Hell was a place of torment, but not just for the human souls. The only respite that the Fallen received within the bowels of Hell were found within one another, and for some, their journeys to the mortal realm. The journeys were, by no means, easy. Simple travel to Earth had been lost to the Fallen as much as the routes to Heaven had been forever blocked to them. He’d had plenty of time to brood over his failures and let the hopelessness of release take over.
Until…
“When Death loves Life, when broken mortality bests heavenly duty, Life will find strength, Death will know freedom, and worlds will crumble as the Devils rise,” Lucifer repeated, his voice carrying the strength and surety of a repeated mantra.
Confusion passed once more over Asmodeus’s face. “I have never heard those words before.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. Save for you, now, I was the only being in existence, to my knowledge, who knows those words. Even the mortal who spoke it does not know of them.”
“They sound like a prophecy, but there have been no prophets for over two thousand years.”
“There have been some, but they are not paid much attention as they once were. The last thousand years alone have seen them regarded as insane or charlatans. Most do not even know of their abilities, spared the curse of it but denied the blessing as well. The one who spoke the very words I recited to you is a woman who only found her gift as she lay, breathing her last.”
“How do you know whether she passed those words onto another, say Azrael?”
Lucifer smiled. “Because she still walks this realm.”
“You said—”
“Dying does not mean dead. I found her when I entered catacombs of a city long since dead and forgotten. Mortals, seeking a book, had taken residence there.”
“Book?”
“The very same infamous lost tome of Metatron’s scribbling.”
“Mortals had it?”
“Only for a moment. They had been searching for years but only gained progress when they took possession of the very same woman who would speak the prophecy I told you. They left her for dead once they had what they needed. I found her as she breathed her last, and her words etched themselves into my mind, giving me a hope that I had not felt since the loss of our children.”
Asmodeus’s face darkened at the mention of the age-old wound. There were many among the Fallen who had lost a child to that old war. Lucifer had not fathered one, but he had loved each Nephilim as if they were his own. The wholesale slaughter of their children still ached in the heart of each and every Fallen within and beyond the walls of Hell.
“For her unwitting gift, I returned her life. She awoke, remembering nothing of the words she spoke, nor of what I had done for her. Yet, she knew I was her Savior, as well as the one willing to preserve the very text that had caused her untimely end. I can still see the look upon her face when I bade her to guard the text, to hide it from the world. So long as she never spoke of it to anyone, no one would ever know that she had it. The group of mortals that had used her to find it had been wiped out. I saw to that. It was safe, and so was she.”
Asmodeus glanced out the window, as if he could see what he was looking for. “Wait. The very same tome that was hidden away in Tobias’ aunt’s home? The mortal woman you spoke of is…”
Lucifer nodded. “Vivian, yes. She and the location of the book are two of my best kept secrets.”
“Why not keep the book while simply giving her back her life?”
Now there was the kicker. Nothing in her prophecy or anything that he had known would have led to that decision. She had spoken the words of prophecy, and the only thing in it that was remotely specific was the very thing that led him to having Azrael surveilled. Yet, he knew the ways of things and felt there was great importance in both her and the book. Coincidence was a rare occurrence, and he saw a connection between the two that he could not explain.
“It was what was right at the time, and now, look at the result of the decision,” he said.
“That book—”
“Contains everything the Host would not want him to know. And none of them knows that the next piece to the equation was right there the whole time. Gabriel and Raphael were mere feet from it and never knew.”
“And your interference at the cabin? They had to have known that was you, or one of us, at the very least.”
“Gabriel, Michael, and Metatron are the only ones who truly know what motivated our little rebellion. The rest, if they should determine that we were the ones who interfered in their search, will assume that we are simply trying to interfere for the sake of causing chaos. Let them fume and sputter about while dealing with both Azrael and attempting to puzzle out our game.”
“Will this woman—Vivian—give Tobias the book?”
“After what he has told her? She will. The book will open its secrets to him. The tale etched in his heart and soul is etched upon the pages within it. It will reveal its secrets enough for him to find his way to me. Or perhaps his path will take him elsewhere, but I believe it will lead him to me, and to us all.”
“They could still discover that he has it.”
“Perhaps, but I believe that they will be distracted by Azrael. I do not believe he will make their judgement of him come easily. We have seen what he wants, and they mean to keep him from it. I hope that my assessment of him is correct, if only because someone should shake them out of their complacency, their mindless adherence and faith.”
“What about Him?”
Lucifer’s lip twisted in a mirthless smile. “Yes, I have pondered that. There is nothing that escapes His notice, for He knows all, yes? Yet, He did nothing in the rebellion, save to cast us down when we were captured, when we had lost. He did nothing but forbid the Nephilim, allowing the Host to fight His war. So far, He has done nothing during this as well, and I think it will stay that way. His belief in free will and conscious action still remains true. I do not believe that will change anytime soon. Only when the dust has settled will He do something, and by then, I aim to have the world changed.”
“What if you’re wrong? What if He smites you, smites us all? To have rebelled once is one matter, and it could be said that only His love for us spared us ultimate destruction. Yet, you cannot say that what we are doing is not bringing great harm to Creation. Would that not be cause to destroy us once and for all?”
“And what is it that we have done? Save for a small bit of interference, we have not once directly acted. Everything that has happened has occurred because one man and one angel have made their own choices. That, I feel, is the key. They have started this, and they must be the ones to finish it. We are merely giving them the chance to see it through.”
“So, those two are stuck in the middle between two opposing forces. Is that the gist of it?”
“Perhaps it is better to say that they are at the center of it all. The beginning from which each side is formed. I only knew that it would come. I did not cause it to be. They have brought it about, and now the Host is scrambling to undo what I wish to see done.”
Asmodeus eased himself slowly into the seat across from him. “And if that is cause enough for the Almighty to wipe all trace of us from Creation?”
Lucifer’s expression changed, becoming both cocky and sad. “I told you that was a possibility when I called upon you all long ago. And if He does? Then He will have given me the peace that I have not had since He threw us all from Heaven.”
Some old and painful emotion flickered behind Asmodeus’s gaze, and he leaned back. Silence hung over them. Lucifer had already made peace with this decision and had only taken on those Fallen who would follow him in this endeavor with the limited information he had given. Now that they were at the eve of Tobias moving beyond the carefully laid boundaries that the Host had crafted about him, he felt confident in revealing so much to at least one more being.
Asmodeus had been one of the first to rise up when he had called to rebel in ages past, and he had done so this time as well. Even knowing very little about Lucifer’s true objective, he had followed his orders faithfully for years. Now he had his answers, knowing what had brought Lucifer to this point, and that the end game really could result in their destruction. The angel’s beauty, and his love for humanity, had led him to the Fall willingly. Now, it was leading him toward possible, ultimate destruction.
Lucifer did not envy him in this moment.
After a long while, Asmodeus looked up, his eyes alight once more. “Then what do we do?”
Lucifer should have known that he could rely upon one of his most trusted friends. “We wait. For now, it all rests on them. When they need us, we will answer the call, and may Heaven and all of its Host be prepared for that day.”