Страница 52 из 57
The walls began to creak and groan, large portions of ancient ice sliding from the walls to shatter upon the floor.
“They sought to keep me from… this.” Lucifer’s voice carried above the rhythmic beating of his awesome wingspan.
And with those words, the Son of the Morning threw out his arms, accepting his environment. The ground writhed like ocean waves; the walls crumbled.
Remy was forced to the air, and he watched in growing horror and awe as the ceiling of the chamber fell away to reveal the tarnished sky of Hell.
Tartarus was crumbling.
Remy flew through the air, dodging huge sections of the ice prison as they came hurtling down at him.
In the icy rubble below he saw them begin to appear, fallen angels that had not been freed in the initial attack. They crawled out from beneath the remains of their prison cells, haunted faces turned toward the heavens of Hell.
Up toward their lord and master.
The light of the Morningstar bathed the Hellish landscape, and like the spread of the most virulent disease, it too began to writhe and change. The ground shook, its dry, blighted surface begi
Riding the powerful updrafts of air, Remy watched with a mixture of wonder and horror as the land was transformed with little regard to those below. The fallen skittered about for safety, many of them falling victim to the shifting ground and the hungry fissures that would swallow them whole.
Hell has to eat if it is to change, to grow into something else.
Remy listened to their screams, their pleas to a god that flew above them, but their cries fell upon deaf ears.
Outrage spurred him on, and before he knew what he was doing, Remy was flying toward the Morningstar; the closer he got, the greater his rage.
There had been the slightest bit of hope, a kernel of chance that the countless mille
That he was repentant.
Remy hadn’t a clue as to what he would do once he reached his opponent, weaponless except for the brute strength of his kind, but he could not stop himself now.
Here was the being responsible for the event that had changed his existence—changed the very nature of Heaven and what it meant to be a servant of God.
Lucifer’s hand wrapped around Remy’s throat in a grip of iron, stopping the Seraphim’s attack with bone-jarring ease.
That glimmer of hope, that kernel of chance was quickly dispelled as the first of the fallen looked down into his eyes. And all Remy could see reflected in that golden-flecked gaze, was a seething fury, anger barely held in check.
“I could end you with the merest flick of my wrist,” Lucifer said, his voice a soft whisper, nearly lost in the cacophonous sounds of a Hell in transition.
Remy felt the grip on his throat grow tighter, the pressure inside his skull so great that he wondered if the top of his head might explode.
“But something prevents me.” Lucifer drew him closer, studying Remy’s straining features.
“You meant something to the being I was,” the Morningstar stated. It was as if a door inside his mind had been suddenly opened, revealing the secret contents held inside, the experiences of a fallen called Madach.
“You believed in my repentance.”
The fingers around Remy’s throat opened, releasing him, and he swam backward through the air, away from his foe.
“For that belief you shall live,” Lucifer said, looking down at the morphing landscape of Hell. The cries of the fallen as they fought to survive drifted in the air like a perverted birdsong.
“And with this gift, I give you purpose.”
Lucifer extended a muscular arm, his long, delicate fingers splayed.
Remy felt the air around him immediately charged. He tried to escape by dropping down to the chaotic terrain that twisted and changed below, but he was held fast by the Morningstar’s will.
“You will be my messenger,” Lucifer said. “You will tell them of my return, that their best-laid plans were for naught, and that they will pay for their transgressions against me.”
The air around him began to crackle, the fabric of Hell’s reality begi
Lucifer was opening a passage.
But to where?
“As to when, that will be for me to decide.”
The portal opened with a terrible sucking sound, and Remy found himself pulled into the blistering cold of its infinite darkness. He tried to stop himself, to hold on to the sides of the puncture made in the sky above Hell, but the pull was too great, and he slipped into the void, the final, chilling words of Lucifer Morningstar sending him on his way.
“For I have a kingdom to build.”
Remy was deposited before the Gates, the stink of Hell radiating from his angelic form.
He fell to his knees as the wound in time and space healed behind him. Eager to breathe in anything other than shadow, he gasped, taking in hungry lungfuls of the suddenly hospitable environment.
He felt the soft earth beneath his knees, the golden-colored grass that tickled the palms of his hands, the fragrant, nearly intoxicating smell of the air; it had been a very long time since he’d been to this place.
But it was impossible to forget.
A fine haze covered the golden plains of grass, but then a gentle breeze stirred, moving aside the curtain of mist to reveal the Gates. Two enormous posts that looked to be fashioned of finely polished bone, or as said some who’d managed to catch a glimpse of the magnificent sight, and remained alive to speak of it, pearl.
Remy rose to his feet upon wobbling legs, lurching forward, drawn toward the magnificent sight.
Toward the only thing that separated him from the kingdom of Heaven.
He could see it there in the distance, through the intricate metalwork that hung between the awesome posts.
Flashes of memory were stirred, and he recalled when last he’d passed through this gateway. It had been at the close of the war, and he thought it would be the last time.
He had abandoned Heaven, or more accurately, Heaven had abandoned him.
Remy stood before the shuttered gates, a glimpse of Heaven partially obscured by the blowing mist beyond them, and knew a serenity that he’d not felt in a very long time.
His Seraphim nature was calmed by the return, sedated by the sight of the golden kingdom beyond the entrance. And deep inside, a little bit more of the humanity that he’d worked so hard to create died.
He reached out, prepared to push the Gates open and stride toward the vast city of light, to deliver the message given to him by its most fallen son.
His hands had barely touched the warm metal when there was a brilliant flash and he was repelled. He lay on the ground stu
Have I been barred from Heaven? His thoughts raced as he again readied to approach the gateway. Is this some sort of punishment for my leaving after the war?
Off in the distance, above the spires of the Heavenly kingdom, Remy saw that it had grown dark, as if storm clouds now hung over the city and were spreading across the skies of Heaven.
But soon he realized that it was not clouds at all.
A great army flew through the sky toward him.
An army of angels.
Heaven’s air was filled with the sound of pounding wings as they approached—swarming across the sky, descending on the other side of the Gate that separated them.
“Hail, Remiel,” an angel at the head of the flock cried, the first to touch down.