Before The First Word-Chapter 45: Ch-: Of Longing and Politics

Michael & Gabriel

"You felt it," she said -- both hands pressed together at her chest, the gesture she’d been making since the founding of the Host, the gesture that had never once been performed in the centuries she’d been making it.

"The name, three days ago, I was amidst the fourth choir’s rehearsal and I simply..."

Her eyes going somewhere past him.

"...sat down. Brother Caelian thought I was unwell... I could not explain that I was the opposite of unwell."

"The opposite of unwell?" Michael repeated.

"There ought to be a word for it. There isn’t, which I find genuinely irritating."

Her brow drew together -- that particular expression, the one she wore when a gap in language offended her precision. Then, without transition: "I want to go."

"Gabriel -- "

"I want to go to the garden. I want to meet him." The hands pressed tighter, knuckles whitening.

"I don’t know precisely what I would do there. Be there, that’s all... be there while it’s happening, while it’s still early, while he still doesn’t have enough words yet to know what questions to ask."

She looked at the still water. The water held the seventh heaven’s light without giving anything back. "Is that foolish?"

"No," Michael said. "It is not foolish."

He looked at the Throne at the garden’s far end. The great occupied absence exhuding off it -- room built for a presence that had elected, for reasons that remained its own, to be elsewhere.

Every angel in the seventh heaven conducted themselves in daily relation to that absence, the way a compass conducted itself in relation to north: without having to think about it, the orientation simply there, structural, bearing the weight.

"He is not what I anticipated," Michael said. The words arriving with the care of someone who has tested a surface before putting their full weight on it.

"Having felt the name arrive... having been in the room when Ferrante spoke it..." He stopped.

Trying the sentence from a different angle. "I have believed, my entire existence, that I understood the scope of what Father loved. The scale of what He chose. I believed I comprehended it." There was pause.

"I comprehended a smaller version of it. A considerably smaller version, and I do not know yet whether the version I held was small by necessity or by failure of imagination, and I find I cannot determine the answer without more time with it."

Gabriel was quiet for a moment -- the airheadedness entirely absent from her, in its place the thing that lived beneath it the way bedrock lived beneath garden soil.

The clarity. The ancient, warm, utterly undeceivable intelligence of something that had been pure since before purity had required effort.

"I miss Him," she said.

Two words...

The whole weight of the seventh heaven’s absence in two words, carried without performance, without the management of how it landed.

The longing of someone who had never decided the absence was acceptable and had therefore never attempted to make peace with it -- who had simply decided to go on loving the wound, the way you went on loving a scar, as the proof of something real that had happened and could not be forgotten.

"Yes," Michael said.

The still water held its light. Above it, the Throne held its readiness. Very far below them both -- through six layers of fire and formation and cold corridor and the long dark between the mortal world and the heavens — a garden glowed in a desert.

A woman was teaching the silence before the Word what grass felt like under a palm.

Gabriel looked at her brother. The brightness in her face arrived the way it always arrived: simply there, the way a lamp was simply there when it had never once been extinguished.

"...When can I go?" she said.

Michael looked at the Throne.

"Soon," he said finally. Turning to look at the absence of the Entity that created everything and left it to his children.

. . .

Lucifer

His thoughts ran the same direction as Gabriel’s, and the acknowledgment of this arrived as its own small injury, taken in silence and filed with everything else he did not examine too closely before it found its shelf.

He stood at the window above London, October rain on the glass. The city below doing what London did — its grey, magnificent, wholly indifferent business, the bus and the pigeons, the gloom of the citizens for the next payday.

He had been thinking about the garden for three days the way you thought about a piece of music heard once in a room you couldn’t return to -- the melody surviving intact in the dark of you while every other particular of the occasion went to ruin.

He wanted to go.

He was not, under any circumstance, going to be the one who said so first.

He straightened from the window. The room arranged itself around him the way it always rearranged itself -- lamp at the precise angle, glass at the precise position on the precise sill, the whole architecture of a man entirely at peace with his own company assembled without conscious effort, because the armour was old enough that wearing it had stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like a posture.

The most comfortable lies were always the structural ones.

His communications piece pulsed. Colder than Paimon’s frequency. Spare as a well-filed document.

Bael.

"You are not calling about a petition..." Lucifer said.

"The Sixteenth Ashen Cohort." Bael’s voice arrived stripped of its usual stone-cold density by the astral channel’s compression, the architecture of it intact where the warmth was absent.

"Three weeks ago they moved into the Veleth Corridor. Asmoday’s claim is built on a conquest right from the Third Border War -- two centuries and forty years old. Technically legitimate."

"Technically legitimate," Lucifer began, "is the most expensive phrase in the administrative vocabulary of the damned. Someone always pays the remainder eventually, and it is rarely the one who invoked it."

"The Corridor runs above the Neth Confluence -- the leyline nexus sustaining six territories. Every day the Cohort holds that position, those territories bleed power they have no capital to replenish. Another month and three of them collapse outright."

He paused for a moment. The rings, audible even across the channel -- the faint shift of silver against stone. "The fourth petition on this dispute landed on my desk the morning the name was spoken. I was reviewing the precedent when I understood what the occupation was actually created to accomplish."

"Which is?"

"Asmoday does not want the Corridor. He wants six territories that cannot survive the loss of the Confluence. The conquest claim is the diversion, not the objective.

When the formal process resolves the claim -- and it will resolve in his favour, eventually, on legal grounds even I cannot overturn -- the territories will already have collapsed.

They will require a patron to rebuild. The patron will have conditions."

A pause so precise it had the weight of punctuation. "I found the architecture admirable in the abstract. In the particular, it requires dismantling."

Lucifer regarded the rain on the glass.

"...I had not thought Asmoday capable of this quality of patience," he said.

"He has had assistance," Bael said. "The Lattice his Cohort is running in the Corridor is disruption-class six -- it suppresses collective intent, makes coordinated engagement impossible. My three legions cannot hold formation inside it. The working is not his construction."

"Whose, then."

"I have a conjecture."

Lucifer looked at the floor. At the distance implied beneath the floor -- the storeys of London, the earth beneath London, the sea beneath the earth, the lower territories somewhere below the sea, conducting their own dark business of contested ground and old claims and administrative patience worn thin.

"I will come," he said. "Have Paimon ready. He will object to the transit."

"Paimon is perpetually ready," Bael said. "He simply requires a destination." 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

. . .

Space folded.

In one motion -- the distance between London and the Veleth Corridor creased and was brought into contact, the way you folded a letter to make the salutation touch the signature.

The sitting room existed. Then it was a paper-thin memory at his back and the lower territories’ cold replaced October rain, the kind of cold that had never been a temperature so much as a permanent feature of the air itself, the cold of somewhere that had been sealed for a long long time.

He had Paimon by the collar. Literally -- the collar of his coat, gripped with the ease of someone who had performed this manoeuvre enough times to have ceased reacting abnormally about it.

Paimon arrived in the lower territories with his feet a full half-second behind the rest of him, seventeen pages billowing from his bag in the transit pressure, his eyes cycling green-amber-green in the distress of a mind that had been at the midpoint of a calculation when the floor made an unilateral decision.

"I was on circle twelve...!!"

"Circle twelve is resilient." Lucifer released his collar.

Adjusted his cuffs -- the reflex impeccable, instantaneous. "It has withstood eleven attempts. A brief interruption will not make it go anywhere."

Paimon gathered his pages with the injured efficiency of a scholar whose work had been handled by someone operating under the misapprehension that pages were interchangeable. "The twelfth was architecturally distinct from the prior eleven."

"They are always architecturally distinct." Lucifer dryly said, but genuinely. The warmth of someone who had been finding this particular man’s eccentricity endearing for an extraordinarily long time. "Come."

Bael stood where the Veleth Corridor opened into the Confluence basin -- three silver rings catching the lower territories’ red light and returning it at the precise angle of something that had decided, centuries ago, what colour it intended to be and had seen no reason to change the decision.

His white hair in this light held a shade that had no name in any mortal language, somewhere between old blood and the inside of a cooling star.

He looked, standing there, like the concept of governance given a face that had stopped needing to perform authority because it had long since become indistinguishable from it.

"Your Majesty," he greeted...

To be continued ...

(Author’s Notes: Here we are with the next Chapter of BTFW my dear readers. We are finally ramping up for Underworld Politics and Lucifer stepping in to slap back unruly demons. Stay tuned for some action pretty soon!!)