Chapter 87

~~Day 145~~

~~Keziah~~

She was too late. But what could she have done if she had found the battalions in time? What could she have said, that Ezekiel had not said?

She stared on at the destruction as a hundred battalions soared across the skies and poured death. The gabriem played their trumpets and empowered the angels, honed their skills, heightened their focus, and molded the army into a cohesive unit. Humans on the surface needed a couple dozen ranks to keep an army organized. Angels needed only soldiers, captains, generals, and the glorious thunder of gabriem trumpets.

But here, they were not glorious. They were death on white wings. Below, False Gate was a wasteland, drowning in explosions of gold and blood. False Gate had changed. The demons below, unstable, were no longer mad. But they were weak. Instead of standing, twitching, accepting death like a long-lost lover, the demons of False Gate now ran for their lives, but with all the strength of newborn children. Someone had broken Belor’s seal. The tortured province was tortured no longer.

The angels did not care. The gabriem unleashed their arrows, and the mikalim unleashed their beams, tearing through thousands of buildings and tens of thousands of demons. Hundreds of thousands. Carpet bombing, according to souls, and the angels used the technique to devastating effect.

But False Gate was a huge province; they all were, five hundred miles wide in the modern age. A hundred battalions had no hope of destroying all of it. Instead, the angel army concentrated its forces in areas, and did sweeping passes from the vortex, to the spire, all the way to the shore of the River Styx.

If David’s sister was down there, would she survive? What hope could she have against angels who exploited their gift of flight?

Keziah shook her head. This had to stop.

She flew. The trumpets awaited her, thunderous roars that filled the air with electric power. The song spoke to her. Join the angels, shoulder to shoulder, wing to wing, and bury the infidels, the sinners, and the demons in God’s wrath. With the arrow of the gabriem, the sword of the mikalim, and the shield of the rapholem, there was no enemy the angels could not defeat. Come, fly with us, Keziah.

The aura filled the sky of fire, but Keziah resisted its alluring call. She flew high, above the battalions, until the endless flames of the sky drowned her in heat. The barrier between Heaven and Hell. The barrier that only Lucifer could penetrate. The discomfort summoned sweat to her skin, but it also cleared her mind of the siren song. She had to speak to the generals, not fall in line like the other angels.

Why did this scene look so familiar?

As she stared at the waves of wings, blurred images cut across her eyes. Not now. Not now! She clutched her helmet and squeezed her eyes shut, but the images tormented her from within, tearing through the darkness of her eyelids. Another memory swimming up from the dark matter of her brain to pierce the surface. Another person’s life, come to engulf her in a past that was not hers.

Heat. The burning flames of the fire sky. False Gate beneath her—no, not False Gate then. Just, Hell, with unnamed provinces. Demons marched across the land, weaving between structures her mind did not understand. Memories. They had to be memories. And like locusts, the demons poured over the buildings of rock, black wood, dirt and ditch, stone and spike, and tore into the angels that fell upon them.

Where was the vortex?

There was no vortex.

A swirling haze cut across the memory, and the beings below came into focus. The strange structures changed, becoming more like buildings her mind understood, as if someone had cast an illusion upon her eyes. The demons changed, too, no longer blurry shapes she could not comprehend. Claws and horns, hooves and talons, tails and wings. Shapes she now recognized.

And like the battalions before Keziah now, the memory tormented her and showed her thousands of angels bombarding the demons below. But these demons from her memory did not die. They stood their ground, and while many were broken, limbs or wings blown off, they did not submit. Children of the Old Ones, titans compared to an angel, the only demons an angel could not defeat in a duel. And they covered the ground, soldiers waiting for the engagement with angels they could not reach. Wolves, prowling the ground, waiting for the birds to descend.

Something reached out across the sky, and Keziah froze. The memory did the same, the memory holder trembling before the might of a colossal arm that reached across the sky. Not an arm, but something arm-like. For a moment, Keziah thought it was David, a fleshy mass reaching up for her. But this was not David, transformed. This was much larger.

A flowing, warping limb of obsidian flesh reached up into the air, and cut through the angel army hovering above the armies below. Ten thousand wings fell to the ground, bodies ripped to pieces, angel armor sent scattering before disappearing in weak flashes of gold. And the demons below roared with joy as angel blood fell upon them.

Another limb shot out from the ground, and another, each of pure black skin and covered in red cracks, as if lava had charred the skin and now lived within its veins. A gargantuan limb that rose from the madness below and ripped through angels as if they were cotton. Keziah could not see where it came from, the battlefield reaching for miles in all directions and filled with angel wings. But she could see the myriad of eyes on the massive, black arms, tearing through the angels and throwing them into the blender of demons waiting below. Each arm was the size of a city.

Lucifer.

What angels that avoided the archangel’s strange limbs had to contend with magical powers of the great betrayer. Treacherous winds and swirling maelstroms of flame pulled down from the sky, attacked the angels, used the air itself against them, and sent them to the ground. And on the ground, the children of the Old Ones were stronger. Angels formed ranks, rapholem circling the gabriem within who unleashed their arrows and healed their comrades, while the mikalim launched outward into the chaos.

They fought well. They fought hard. The cursed memory brought Keziah down into the depths of the fight, and whoever the memory belonged to spun as she summoned her shield. A rapholem’s greatshield. A mighty wall of gold erupted outward and blocked the teeth and claws of two children of the Old Ones, goliaths of power and carnage that roared and drooled with frenzied hunger. The battlefield was blanketed in auras from all sides, each demon unleashing their desires, while the angels fought the auras off with their own, auras of control, resilience, and command. Chaos against order.

Keziah, or whoever she was, spun at the sound of a great roar. Behind her, more black flesh oozing with lava, like pus dripping from wounds, covered the sky, and black feathers joined them upon writhing limbs covered in thousands of eyes.

But that was not all. Before her, a different monster roared. A dragon. An insidious, titanic creature, wriggling across the battlefield like a snake with legs, while a dozen black and red wings stuck out from its back. An Old One, here to help its master.

“Molech!” Keziah said. Not Keziah, but ... Keziah.

The surrounding demons ran, roaring, some cackling as they put buildings of rock and stone between themselves and the circle of angels.

“Incoming!” Keziah yelled. She raised her shield with her brothers and sisters, and together, summoned a golden wall against the approaching Old One.

Keziah wanted to look behind her again, to see what the archangel of light, the morning star, was doing in the battle. Surely they had to focus on stopping him and his grotesque limbs of onyx. But an Old One was coming for her, and the angels had no choice but to face the mighty serpent. They all knew that Lucifer had a goal, a battle plan, but the demons were far simpler, and that included the Old Ones. They wanted to destroy, and Keziah’s battalion was its closest target.

Keziah’s battalion? The memories bled into her mind, and more than sights, sounds, and smells taunted her. Thoughts not her own joined them.

Molech drowned the battlefield in rumbling sound, and unleashed hellfire. The terrible flames crashed against Keziah’s shield, and she screamed with her own rage against the tide of death. She would not yield. She would not relent. They had to give Raphael, Michael, and Gabriel time.

But as the waves of hellfire relented, leaving the battlefield around the angels a wasteland of dead demons and companions alike, a strange, howling gust forced her to look back. Like a burning shadow, more black limbs reached up from the battlefield, surrounded by black feathers the size of buildings that did not yet even exist. Limbs as big as mountains reached higher, and higher, and no matter how many angels unleashed gold destruction, they managed only surface wounds. The great limbs regenerated in moments.

Higher, and higher. The black limbs, dozens of them, reached for the burning sky. The air itself tore apart with shimmering cracks of red lightning. The ground tore apart, and millions of bodies fell to their knees, driven down by unnatural hurricane winds. What angels who freed themselves of nearby demons took to the air again, only to be incinerated in rising waves of hellfire before they could attack Lucifer. Molech’s hellfire.

Lucifer was beyond imagination. Tens of millions of angels weaved through hellstorms, fire tornados, and red lightning, all to stop Lucifer’s limbs that blanketed the sky itself. But Molech, no larger than one of Lucifer’s fingers, was its own threat, and it charged forward to Keziah’s group.

“Where is Navameere!?” her companion yelled. “He said he would be with us!”

Not-Keziah shook her head. “Navameere will be delayed. We will have to contend with this ourselves!”

Her name? What was her name? The memory teased her with it, let it drift to the tip of her tongue, but did not give it to her.

Not-Keziah took to the air, her comrades in arms at her sides, and the rapholem led the charge against Molech. The dragon could fit fifty angels in its mouth with a single bite, and the angels knew that. They flew in low, over the swords and axes of the monster’s children, and cut into the Old One’s arms. Its aura soared across the battlefield, an invisible wind to join Lucifer’s maelstroms. And even the Old One itself reached out and summoned a geyser of lava from underneath Not-Keziah’s troops, using the same magic only the archangels could wield. Angels died. Demons died with them.

The Old Ones did not care how many demons they killed. Monsters.

Several council angels soared through the fire tornados, six great wings upon their backs glowing gold and protecting them from the flames as they took up positions over Molech. Tall, androgynous angels, and while the gabriem, rapholem, and mikalim wielded weapons blessed to them by Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael, the council angels wielded the weapons given to them by God. Enormous greatswords wielded with two hands, glorious and perfect. The trio of angels flew around Molech, bombarded it with searing beams and exploding arcs of golden energy, and summoned powerful auras of might and strength. A thousand angels joined them, surrounded Molech, and hacked and stabbed, bringing the beast low as they tore through its tendons and muscles. And a thousand rapholem surrounded the battle and summoned their gold walls to hold Molech’s children at bay.

But they could not kill Molech, only wound it. Even as the council angels unleashed their power, brought their swords to bear, and swung them down deep into the giant monster’s flesh, Molech’s wounds healed. They could only delay the monster until the archangels arrived. They would bind it. With Navameere’s knowledge, the watchers would bind the Old Ones and remove them from the battle. They—

A terrible, inhuman cry cut across the field, and everyone stopped. Never had such a sound been uttered, a shriek beyond angel or demon mouth, and it sundered the air. A million angels flew clear of the colossal black limbs filling the sky, the terrible screaming sending them fleeing to get away.

The horrible black wings spread, a size Not-Keziah could not understand the scale of. Entire swaths of the army disappeared behind them, blocked by them, and between the many great wings, the strange limbs reached higher and higher from the central mass of writhing, black flesh. The limbs weren’t just covered in titanic eyes. They were covered in mouths. Screaming, roaring mouths, each the face of an angel, but from a distance they looked like nothing more than grains of sand on a long black beach.

The limbs reached up, miles long, and the battle came to a stop as everyone stared. Claws from hands that defied reason grabbed the burning sky, and hands on arms that made no sense bent and twisted to get a grip on the flaming embers. Another terrible cry ripped through the province, and angels and demons alike covered their ears as best they could as they stared. And Molech, for all its terrible strength, trembled, a pebble in the shadow of a mountain, as Lucifer slowly ripped the sky apart.

The other archangels were too late.

A fresh wind flowed across the land, searing the province with sparks of strange colors: blue and purple flames, green and red lightning. A thousand tornadoes danced, reaching from sky to ground. Hellquakes sundered the rock below, and lava gushed up onto the surface with the broken buildings and unholy landmarks. Between Lucifer’s hands, a new tornado emerged, coming down from the sky like the others, but slowly, as if it were a creature searching for purchase as it emerged. Pure destruction, the barrier between Heaven and Hell given form, a tornado several miles wide wrapped in a hurricane wrapped in fire and lightning of a myriad of colors.

More council angels joined the battle, soaring beams of gold light that cut across the sky like comets, each aimed for the horrific arms of Lucifer tearing open the barrier. But new giant creatures reached high and filled the air with waves of hellfire. Abaddon and Beelzebub. The two Old Ones reached their strange bodies into the air, stood on strange legs, and turned the sky into a maze of flame. And with what strange power Lucifer had bestowed upon them, they altered Hell herself as well. Red lightning crashed upon the council, guided by their silent song. Geysers of lava filled with flecks of hellfire shot up from the ground and barred the council’s path. All was mayhem.

The Old Ones were defending Lucifer, and the council could not get past them and their magic.