Chapter 90

~~Day 146~~

~~Keziah~~

Mia was the same. Thank the Lord, Mia was the same as her brother.

One look into the young woman’s eyes would have been enough to convince any angel. If only Tzorael and the other generals had been willing. At least Amnon had, once he had realized the aliens were here to kill the unmarked, too, and not simply devour them.

How many angels had Keziah killed to fight her way back into Hell? And now two exarchs lay dead upon the clouds of Heaven, Ashkarial and Malchiel, guardians who had only wanted to stop Keziah, stop the general Sheela, and stop Othrael and Oriyah, from defying their leaders.

Memories blurred across Keziah’s mind, Ariyael’s memories, images of her spear stabbing past armor and into the eyes of comrades. Angels, dead, by the millions. And now Heaven’s civil war echoed the past.

As she hovered over the battlefield, Keziah looked at her spear and squeezed the long, silvery grip. With the help of the exarchs, she had struck down angels far more powerful than herself. But her own power was a surprise, too.

She was no first-rank rapholem. This was not her power. It was Ariyael’s.

Snapped back to the present by Othrael’s yell, Keziah hovered by Oriyah and skewered a flying alien. To fly was God’s gift, a precious gift that God had stripped from Lucifer when he had cast his first son to the fiery pits of Hell. And yet this invader flew, soared through the air in waves, adorned in black and purple robes, and launched strange orbs of destruction with the speed of a mikalim’s holy arcs of essence.

Keziah brought her greatshield to bear, and let old impulses guide her. Ariyael’s speed and strength took her, ensured each orb crashed against the metal, and she threw the spear with a true strike. The mirror blade sank into alien flesh, and with a moment’s effort, Keziah re-summoned the spear to her hand.

The larger aliens, hundred-foot-tall mammoths of weight, carried their masses up to the guardian Oriyah’s golden wall and smashed their hands against it, sending pulsing gold cracks along its surface. And the reaper Othrael’s next slice of pure annihilation split alien flesh, wounding the mighty alien fighting the Old One Molech within the chasm, but did not kill it.

Keziah flew low, joined a dozen mikalim on the warpath, and sank her spear into the head of a juggernaut trying to break the guardian angel’s shield. It shrieked up and swatted at her, as if she were some annoying bird attacking it for coming too close to its nest. But she bashed the colossal hands aside with her shield and forced the spear deeper. Again it tried to dislodge her, but the mikalim drove their swords into its arms, a dozen blades of perfect sharpness that cut through obsidian flesh and alien muscle filled with white blood. Its scream was not of this world, a strange sound that tore through Keziah’s mind even as it ripped sound from her ears and drowned her in silence. If she had been human, the dissonance would have wrenched the food from her stomach.

The creature fell with a mighty crash, and its bulk faded into nothingness in seconds. But the other juggernauts did not react. They crashed against Oriyah’s shield, and their strange, squid-like faces remained aimed at the tunnel and the parted sea. Hundreds of the smaller aliens did the same, throwing claws and tridents at the gold barrier, while their hovering brethren blanketed it in explosions, each orb a tiny black hole, bending light around it. And when the orbs exploded, Keziah’s breath caught short as tiny cracks in existence threatened to pull her gaze into the endless nothing beyond, where twinkling lights in the black were not stars at all, but hungry eyes.

She gritted her teeth and brought down a second alien. “Where is Tzorael? Amnon!?”

“Dead,” another angel said, a mikalim man joining her and cutting down one of the four-legged aliens rushing her. “As is Shezra.”

“All three generals of Yathael are dead?”

“Yes, Keziah.”

Tzorael, mikalim. Amnon, rapholem. And Shezra, gabriem. Many of their captains still lived, but the chain of command was broken.

God, forgive her.

“Then I am taking charge.”

The mikalim froze. “I am sorry, rapholem, but you are—”

“I am Ariyael, third-rank rapholem general of Yathael, and one of the first! I have seen God with my own eyes, young mikalim, and they would disown us for this insanity. I am taking charge, and with our might, we will see the alien destroyed.” She hovered in front of the mikalim and the others who had joined him, a dozen pairs of wings and eyes staring at her. “Do I make myself clear?”

For all the confusion her words wrought, the dozen men and women nodded.

The alien presence brought one boon: the storms were over. Without the power of the silent music, neither the Old Ones nor the unmarked could wield Hell’s environment against them. And for all Molech’s fire breath and the breath of the giant alien sharing its canyon, they were far more manageable than the firestorms of before.

She took to the sky, swooping left and right and spearing the heads and chests of the hovering aliens as she went. She found a gabriem, and she explained. She found another, and again, explained what was happening. With each moment, she found a new angel to recruit: captains looking for guidance, and squadrons with wounded and dying friends in their arms. She found groups who had organized themselves into strike forces, spearheading descents into the madness below. She found rapholem guarding gabriem, small pockets of defended territory where the gabriem could heal the hurt.

A thousand. Two thousand. Three. What was left of the armies, she brought together over Oriyah’s wall. There was no time to halt and speak; she spoke as they battled. Together they flocked and poured over the guardian angel’s defense, cut down the flying aliens before swooping low and cleaving through the juggernauts and the soldiers alike. A small reprieve for the guardian was all they had time for.

In the distance, Molech and Othrael were working together to keep the greatest of the aliens subdued, but for all their combined might, the creature still lived. She had to act quickly.

“We have one mission here,” she said to her growing army, mid-thrust of her spear. “Disagree if you like, but you will obey. Your duty is not to the council, nor to your generals. Your duty is to the Great Tower and to the souls within it! We will work together, fight together, and we will defend this forlorn tower against the oblivion that comes for us!” How naturally the words came to her. Without thought, without effort, her voice rose above the noise and guided the wings following behind her. “Come, warriors of Heaven! We will expel this alien, and make ready this Great Tower for God’s return!”

Would God ever return?

The thought summoned something bitter, and every muscle in Keziah’s body demanded she wince, demanded she let her voice falter. She did not let it. As the bitterness roiled in her gut, it reached her heart, and a coldness she had felt only in the deepest recesses of her mind stabbed into her bones. Weight drowned her, pulled her wings down, and only her resolve kept them up.

The dread.

She clenched her eyes shut for but a moment, screamed a battle cry, and charged the titans of the canyon.

Molech kept its attention on the alien beside it, ignoring Keziah and her contingent of angels. Even Othrael ignored the ancient enemy and focused his attacks on the alien invader. The reaper flew down into the canyon where both titans’ bodies writhed with unknowable limbs, and he brought his sword up against the alien’s tentacles. It screamed as the reaper sheared through a tentacle and sent the colossal limb down into the depths. Again, the reaper dashed to the side, a silver comet crackling with black lightning, and he cut a gash over what had to be the monster’s chest.

There was a body under that octopus-mantle of a head, hidden in the shadows. But it could not bring it up to meet them, not yet, thank the Lord.

The alien brought a tentacle down upon the reaper, and Othrael’s body disappeared into the black of the canyon.

“Othrael!” Keziah yelled.

“General,” the angel at her flank said. “What do we do now?”

She sucked in a breath, squeezed her spear, and pointed. “Charge!”

Together, her forces flowed in a beautiful stream of wings. Mikalim beams and gabriem arrows shot aliens out of the sky, while Rapholem shields guarded the army’s sides and underbelly. They moved together, a densely knit flock of white and gold, thousands of wings that blotted out the sky. The aliens looked up, black eyes staring as the flowing wave of white death soared over the battlefield and crashed upon the titan alien in the ravine.

It was wounded. Much of its body was burned and still burning, flickering hellfire flames dancing along the obsidian flesh, peeling it away, and revealing the white muscle underneath. The gashes Othrael had made along its mantle were enormous, and several had punctured the terrible eyes of the beast, though it still had a dozen left to watch Keziah and her army swarm it.

“Molech!” Keziah yelled. “Our battle is not with you this day! The alien must be defeated first!”

Molech. She was talking with Molech, the Old One she had seen in her memory, the dragon of many wings and many arms. It, he, had not been bound in the memory. He had roamed the battlefield of False Gate and used limb and music alike to slay angels by the uncountable. And here, now, his limited and broken body wrestled with the alien titan. He was their only ally.

“Angels,” the beast rumbled, titanic mouths layered upon each other whispering with the force of hellquakes. “Only now do you see reason?”

“Later, Old One! To battle!”

Molech snarled at her, his head large enough to swallow her and a hundred of her comrades in a single bite. And he used those jaws on the alien. The dragon twisted against his opponent, wrestled claw and muscle against tentacle, and brought his multiple mouths down onto the alien’s body. Gargantuan teeth sank into alien skin, pierced the hide, and earned alien shrieks from the invader. It tried to dislodge Molech, brought its tentacles around the monster’s face and neck and pushed against him, but Molech held fast.

Keziah aimed her spear down at the greatest of the wounds Othrael had rendered to the invader’s octopus-like mantle. “There! Now!”

A thousand arcs of golden energy launched down at the invader, ignoring Molech entirely. A thousand arrows followed, each landing within a few centimeters of each other, all guided into the bleeding wound of the massive beast. Fresh waves of white blood gushed from the lesion, but they did not pierce deep enough.

Keziah flew in, and the army followed. With glowing wings, they landed on the giant mantle, stepped onto the exposed white muscle, and sank mirror blades into flesh. Spears and swords carved through meat, but to call it meat was wrong. It was all wrong. A facsimile of ancient fears, a creature of the deep whose body was not flesh or of the afterlife. It felt ... false. And the strange, fake flesh resisted her spear’s tip. She screamed down at the alien monster, flared her wings, and sank her spear in deeper.

Tentacles swung out and crashed against her comrades, limbs of pure size and mass, many a dozen meters thick. Angels let out last roars of defiance, or yells of surprise, as the titanic limbs crushed them. Some escaped with only a broken limb. Many died instantly, batlam runes fading away, and their unarmored bodies rolled off the struggling creature’s head and down into the depths of the canyon.

Keziah closed her eyes, ears, and heart to the sounds, and drilled the spear in deeper. Deeper. She flared her wings again, poured her grace into every feather and inch of her muscles. Kill it! Her companions did the same, wings drowning the beast in gold as they drove their weapons into the wound Othrael had made. But the tentacles did not stop. The angels were barely more than flies, and the beast swatted them, each swipe of its tentacles breaking bones and taking lives.

Keziah did not stop, either. This could not all be for naught! She refused. She would not let the Great Tower die. Ariyael would not let it die.

Perhaps it was better this way. Even now, as she plunged her spear into the alien flesh, hacking and stabbing, exposing more of the fake white muscle below, the dread ate at her. Ice in her veins, in her grace. Ice that crept up her spine and made her limbs grow numb, even as her insides ached all the more. Ice that—

Keziah and her army jumped back as the alien’s white flesh exploded. A comet of silver, crackling with black lightning, erupted from the center of the great wound in the alien’s mantle, and it shot up into the sky.

Othrael. The reaper hovered over the angels, stared down at them, and held his sword out at his side. The mirror blade shone with silver, crackled with black death, and white blood dripped from every groove in the reaper’s armor.

The alien beast slowly went limp. A myriad of tentacles the size of city streets fell, crashing against the canyon side or Molech’s arms, and dangled loose below the mantle of the octopus-like alien. Its black eyes stared off at nothing as all motion ceased, until Molech finally released his bite.

It fell. The angels took to the sky and watched the alien titan sink into the canyon and disappear below the bottom of Hell. The literal bottom.

Keziah stared down into the depths, and was petrified. The invader sank into it like a drop of ink upon a black ocean. What of the Great Tower that hit the bottom, demon and angel, rock and lava, all evaporated, like ash from a fire. But the falling alien flesh sank beyond the borders of Hell, and into the dark eternity beyond. And the black ocean looked up at her.

Something moved within the water, something alive — or at least aware — and it flowed with the speed of icebergs as it locked its eye on Molech and the angels.

But nothing came.

Othrael fell.

“Reaper!” Keziah flew to his side and caught him, and the man relaxed against her, an arm over her shoulder.

“Or ... Oriyah,” he whispered.

Keziah snapped her eyes back to the shoreline and the snake tunnel. The guardian angel’s barrier was gone.

~~Mia~~

Stay? Go? Help? Run? She had no idea, no clue, and no fucking plan. What would David do? He’d make a decision, any decision. He’d do something!

Mia looked behind her. The tunnel waited, a long snake skeleton forged of blackstone that ran along the ocean floor. Peeking between the ribs showed the ocean walls, ready to fall and kill anyone within the tunnel, if the song failed. And Mia’s group stood in its mouth.