Lucifer felt the change the moment God’s almighty power surged. Circled around the concaved pool that glimpsed into infinity, he witnessed the phenomenon as their levitating creator glowed brighter than the sun. Every one of his nerve endings tingled with warmth, forcing the light he was made up of to burn brighter and brighter. Yet he was not afraid. He believed in his maker with his grandiose plans, and he was far from alone. The eleven other archangels glowed brighter too, the luminosity that made up their essence burning with intensity in reaction to God’s will.

Then the warmth and serenity they had come to trust in the Realm of Light shifted.

Lucifer choked back a cry as agony ripped through his soul. The shock of sound heightened a sudden panic in him. The other angels gasped and screamed too, vocalizing their pain as the trustful offering of their light took a brutal turn. It was the first vocalization that had ever been made since their maker forged them from his own radiance. The beginning of language that was passed from lips rather than telepathically—because with this torturous pain, something epic was happening. Luminous strands tangled through the air around the concaved looking glass, the brilliant white being drawn from the twelve angels and into their God. With each passing moment, the ground vibrated and the pool rippled. Sounds of shifting and forming crashed and rattled behind them. The angels’ glorious light dimmed too, growing fainter and fainter.

Lucifer was the first to feel the change, the weakening of the power God had infused them all with. Yet he did not question it or give in to alarm as his essence was floored. He trusted the one who had brought him and his heavenly brothers and sisters into existence. He trusted God’s plan. His vision for a future unlike anything that had ever existed.

Still now and forevermore immortal, Lucifer watched in awe as the angels’ spherical forms dimmed. Glowing curves and lines evolved, becoming more an more clear as something in him expanded, forcing breath to fill what had never needed air before. Folded and hunched around the edge of the water that glimpsed below, he saw cuts of flesh form and stretch over the others, all the while feeling the cutting phenomenon morphing his essence into something more…tangible.

A quiet cry to his side sent a strike of fear through Lucifer. He reached out fast with a hand that appeared in bone and then flesh—the names came to him as if God were telepathically implanting the knowledge of their new forms—to grasp onto a much smaller and more delicate hand. The instant touch of her dulled the striking agony that felt more like Lucifer was being torn apart piece by piece rather than being created into more than what he or any of them had ever been. The sigh she expelled at his touch eased his consuming worry for her. He had never felt anyone before, never had flesh and bone to reach out and touch her with. The one angel who had been beside him in light since the dawn of existence. “Gabriel.”

The name he had never spoken out loud—and now he wanted to say it again, over and over. Instead, the reflection in the shimmering water stole his focus as his stinging flesh continued to take shape. Sight blurred, their two evolving forms rippled. Lucifer looked toward her, squinted eyes traveling up over the radiance still obscuring her developing form. His sudden need to behold her compelled his actions—but before he could see her face, he was brought to the glowing ground. Lancing pain shot up from behind him, high on his raw back and his mouth gaped to scream. Other screams joined the chorus, different in tone to the deep timbre of his voice.

The hand he still held squeezed tighter, trembling as Gabriel clung to him. “Lucifer…”

Her soft voice gasping his name for the first time sent a wave of chills through him. He squeezed back, struggling to form words, desperate to let her know she was not alone in this, that she would never be alone as long as he was alive. What had once been telepathic words in his mind solidified into clumsy speech. “I am…here.”

With a last surge of power, light was stripped from every one of the twelve angels, leaving a gentle glow that haloed each of their—bodies. Lucifer gaped at the reflection in the water, seeing the distorted reality of what he and all his heavenly brothers and sisters had been transformed into. He didn’t look up as the sounds of shuffling and groaning reached his ears. The siphoned light centering them all in a levitating sphere above the rippling water was not enough to hold his gaze. Gabriel’s hand slid free of his, and he felt an instant loss as her warm touch faded. Worry overtook his senses, yet he could not move to sit like he could hear the others were doing. A burdening weight pressed down over him, covering him in a velvety blanket of warmth. Yet it was not what continued to keep him floor bound. Vision blinking crystal clear, it was what encompassed his sight that kept him down.

He could do naught but stare.

Draped in magnificent white wings, Gabriel gasped short, yet slowing breaths beside him. The arch of her feathered attachments covered her shoulders. The tips stretched so long that they sheltered her entirely from view. And then she shifted. Back levering up, her concealing wings moved with her. Little glimpses of her long limbs and equally pale body peeked out from the iridescent feathers. Her skin was the softest thing Lucifer could ever imagine seeing. Even softer than his own feathers that brushed over his new and sensitive flesh that prickled and tingled with each breath. Studying all he could glimpse, his eyes traveled from her legs that were folded beneath her to her petite bottom, slight hips, to the silvery hair that cascaded down over her shoulders to pool between her legs. Letting his gaze travel higher, he counted each rib bone beneath her—

Lucifer sucked in a breath as he saw the small swells that ballooned out further up her chest. With the rest of her skin so pale, the blushing circles with their own pointed peaks captivated him. Her shimmering hair curled gently around her breasts that swelled from her chest as if to draw and keep his stare.

Gabriel’s vast wings cocooned her body then, cutting off Lucifer’s view and causing him to finally shift to sit upright. “L…look.” The gentle lilt of her voice caused a flurry inside him as her delicate hand reached out from beneath her wings, pointing to the area above the looking glass.

The heat all around them spiked, that centering brilliance so bright it was almost blinding. Lucifer wondered if all the heat solely came from the visible and powerful source. He breathed in as if inhaling her angelic words into himself. Something forever changing was on the precipice of happening, and he was here as a witness as much as a source of power to be called upon. God had put his light into all of them in the beginning, and now that power was needed for something else. Something new.

Yet he could not bring himself to look away from her.

He had to see more. He had to behold every detail of the angel he’d been spiritually—soulfully—connected to for more than a millennia.

A sudden explosion of light shook the realm. Gabriel shielded her eyes from the sight, watching lower as God sent his and their combined power down into the darkness of the great beyond. There was a sound of collisions and a resounding BOOM that shook the luminous ground beneath them.

This was the moment they were meant to witness, the creation of Below, a new realm of physical and living things.

Lucifer couldn’t do it.

He could not bear witness to all the beauty that was being forged below, because what he was fixated on at this very moment was the most beautiful thing he could ever have imagined. Even obscured in clarity by the intensity of the brightness all around them, he studied every detail, seeing in his mind what was beneath the blurry edges that were like looking through water. Her chin was round yet pointed, leading back to a jaw that disappeared below her long silvery hair. He gaped as he studied her lips that were both full and rosy, so living in color that they made him think of her swelling chest hidden below. But the one thing that stole his gaze and kept it there was none of that. Above her little nose, he found her eyes. The first eyes he had ever seen. Rimmed in black lashes, the pools of her eyes glittered with blue and silver, and as he stared, he saw something welling in them that he did not understand. Something that intrigued and fascinated him. Her eyes were misty as she peered down at the changing sight below. And then she blinked.

A silver drop plunged down, rolling a sparkling track down her pale cheek.

Lucifer touched her jaw, the drop that was wet and warm trailing down his finger and tingling as if absorbing into his flesh. Gabriel gasped and looked right at him with her beautiful eyes that resembled the pools of water that were forming below. Scouring his features, she studied every part of his face. As the wonder in her own eyes brightened, Lucifer dared to glimpse his reflection in the rippling water they were crouched by. Unlike Gabriel, his flesh was golden as was his hair that reached his broad shoulders. His eyes were the same silver-blue color as hers, but his body was much larger and defined by bulges and ripples compared to her soft curved lines.

“Lucifer.”

His name from her lips was like a soft caress that cascaded over his entire body. With each fleeting moment that took but a second and eons at the same time, the blurry lines around Gabriel came into focus. Even his imagination could not have prepared him for this. The crystal clear sight of her, and even more than that, the raw emotion that sparkled from her wet eyes.

Lucifer saw with total clarity the one being that would come to be the center of his universe—and the bane of his existence. “My Gabriel.”