Chapter Text
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All the lights of Heaven dimmed for Emily the moment Lucifer’s powers came unspooled from their seal and returned to him. The seraphim whispered among themselves, tsking and shaking their heads, while all of Heaven went back to basics, no longer questioning, no longer doubting. Sera pulled Emily off the ground gently and told her that she needed to go to the Winners, to soothe them.
The unspoken was you gave them the wrong kind of hope- deal with it, but obviously Sera was far too kind to say as much out loud. It was hidden behind the lines of her eyes, pinned there by stress that all the elder seraphim carried, denied to Emily, because she was supposed to be kept innocent and pure to make sure all of the souls under their care remained happy. She was learning how to carry weight that no one had ever expected her to carry now. She could not be told to smile and nod and make everyone happy, knowing beneath her feet that others suffered.
The work had to be done, regardless. Feeling bold enough to realize she didn’t have to like that, she yanked her hand out of Sera’s, turned up her nose, and started to walk away.
Four figures stood in her path.
They were seraphim, but greater than any that Emily had seen in her long existence. The one who stood in front had gorgeous pale golden hair that fell in waves down his shoulders and the most intense blue eyes she had ever seen. Three sets of additional white wings crowned his head, moving in time with the three sets on his back as he shook out each feather like they’d been in disuse for far too long.
Emily didn’t recognize him, but Sera gasped and brought a hand to her mouth to stifle any further blasphemy, as if she was expected to be nothing but pristine in front of this glowing golden figure. “Archangel Michael?”
Now Emily’s eyes widened, turning from Sera to the Archangel who hadn’t been seen since the Fall. She had been created after, meant to lighten the load for the higher echelon of seraphim who had to step up while the Archangels retired for reasons no one was certain of, though there were always rumors. Rumors that suggested grief and pain from the agony of what had to be done, rumors that suggested that they sealed themselves away to avoid throwing themselves into the Pit alongside Lucifer. The Archangels were always the closest of the Host- having to toss out their youngest sibling would devastate anyone.
But she couldn’t help but notice there were four when there should have been seven and that painted a, if you’ll pardon the term, damning picture.
Bereft of any protocols for this and receiving no guidance from a shellshocked Sera, Emily curtsied before Michael, forgetting her anger and frustration in favor of humility. “It’s an honor to finally meet you.”
Michael’s ice-chip blue eyes shifted from Sera’s shocked expression to Emily. He was so tall, nearly eight feet, and when he spoke to her, he knelt so that he could be on eye level with her. “Hello, Emily. You must be one of the new seraphim that came after of us. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
He spoke with a gentle, light cadence, a slight rasp to his voice that came from years of exaltations and singing rather than from cigarettes and hard living like some of the human souls here. He had the aura of a friendly youth pastor and all Emily wanted to do was drop to her knees so that she would be beneath him again, not on eye level, because he was just so blindingly bright.
“Are we going to do this for every new seraphim we run into?” One of the other Archangels spoke up- she was plump, boisterous, and solid white from her hair to her wings to the furry ruff around the collar of her pale dress. She carried herself with far more attitude and resentment and kept leering at Sera. Emily wasn’t certain she liked her but the pressure weighing down on her from her mere presence kept her from even looking her in the eye to try defiance. It was unheard of, and therefore impossible, to stare an archangel in the eye and not be awed. Lucifer was the only exception, still young and fledgling when he had fallen. He hadn’t even grown in the extra wings she was noticing that all of them had about their heads beneath their halos- pure white, storm gray, and burnished gold.
“Uriel,” the shortest archangel, though still taller than Emily herself by a significant amount, spoke up in a soft, lightly accented voice. His hair was dark and curly and there was a youthful, borderline cherubic shape to his face. “We’ve been gone a long time.”
“And we could have been gone longer if someone hadn’t messed in our nest, Raphael.” Uriel rolled her pale eyes. “Get to the point, Michael.”
Michael sighed and straightened, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Gabriel, please. You know I hate conflict like this. Can you… Explain?”
Gabriel, the last angel, the tallest at ten feet- lean and lanky and bald and dark-skinned- strode forwards, shaking out his gray wings. He coughed into his closed fist and stepped up to Sera. And then he spoke with force. “Woman, what the fuck is happening out here? We left this shit on lock ten thousand years ago and now suddenly it’s all gone to shit? Bitch, what?”
Emily held her hands to her mouth to stifle her own gasp, though Sera’s expression remained neutral. Either profanity had lost its effect on her or the source made it more palatable. Once he was finished practically spitting at her, she stood up straighter and put on her best High Seraph Voice. “Archangels, we made an agreement with Lucifer in order to test the effect he is having on Hell, whether he cares about the souls there.”
“Why?” Uriel scoffed.
Emily, with no regard for her safety or anything resembling propriety, lunged in front of Sera, a mouse facing down lions with only her own divinity and commitment to Heaven to back her up. She felt Sera trying to pull her back, to order her to stand down, but she heard and felt nothing but her own blood boiling. “There are souls in Hell that want to be redeemed so they can come here. There’s something wrong with the system. I don’t know what it is yet, but this doesn’t feel right.”
Uriel placed a hand on the side of her mouth and coughed. “Sounds familiar.”
Sera must have felt the similarity herself. She pulled Emily back and behind her while she was too stunned at being so quickly dismissed. “Please, don’t punish her. She does not doubt. She believes in Heaven with all of her heart, I promise you.”
“I can speak for myself!” Emily snapped, forcing herself out from behind Sera by throwing out her wings and hovering. “Tell them about the exterminations, Sera! Tell them what you allowed Adam to do to those poor souls.”
The next hour went by in a blur of explanations of the last ten thousand years, profanity from Gabriel, and a lot of interjections from Emily whenever she heard something new she didn’t like with the occasional scoff or embittered remark from Uriel. They had moved inside Sera’s office so not to alarm the Winners and lesser Heavenborn and the only thing that had really changed with the scenery was that Sera was now sitting down behind her desk getting bombarded on all sides.
Predictably, not one archangel raised so much as an eyebrow about the Exterminations. None of it seemed to faze them at all, aside from Gabriel, who seemed to be designated as the one to react in anger for the entire group and his anger seemed to be focused around the point, not the point itself. It wasn’t until Sera finally finished explaining that Michael finally sighed and spoke for the first time since he delegated all reactions to Gabriel or, occasionally, the snide and disgusted Uriel.
“Regardless, that seal breaking isn’t why we’ve returned. Lucifer can do as he wishes in his own prison, but sealing a seraph’s power means that power can be transferred, even if very few could hold onto it. The unspoken devastation of that power in the hands of… certain, ambitious, opportunistic figures would be catastrophic. We locked ourselves away believing that with us gone, there would be no reason for it to seek revenge.”
“What are you saying?” Emily asked, voice barely over a whisper. She looked to Sera, who was just as confused as she was and that thoroughly terrified her. There shouldn’t be anything that Sera didn’t know, especially when many of the things she knew were anathema to everything Emily was taught to be. She had too many dark secrets for there to be darker ones beyond her ken.
“I’m saying that the problem has never been Lucifer.” Michael paced away from them, walking towards the window that overlooked so much of Heaven. “It’s really come so far without us… We would never have left you behind if we didn’t believe you could do it, Sera.”
Sera stood again, pushing her chair back slightly. “I’m flattered, Michael, but I still don’t understand.”
Michael’s fingers tightened around the windowsill. “No. You wouldn’t. We wanted to keep that burden from you and the other seraphim.”
Only grace kept Emily from turning to her elder sister and giving her a smug stink-eye, but a vicious little thought still found its way to the forefront of her mind as she kept her eyes down on the floor. Feels bad, doesn’t it?
“Regardless, I need to know now,” Sera’s voice quivered- with anger or sorrow, it was hard to say and maybe even the High Seraph, herself, did not know. True angels were not permitted a wide range of emotions. It would lead to complications, to doubt, to free will. They were blissfully ignorant of nuance and therein lay the trouble, Emily found. The world wasn’t black and white, us and them. And the archangels had known it all along and still led the rest of the host to keep up the pretense until it was their sole reality. There was nothing in place to prevent disaster once it became clear that wasn’t the truth.
Yet again, Emily felt that the world was changing and there was nothing in place to break her fall when everything she knew crashed around her and bore her down with it.
“In the beginning,” Michael whispered, like an oath, like something that had been recited to him so many times that it had been ingrained into his very being, wrapped tightly around his essence like a noose waiting to choke him, “there was darkness… and God said ‘let there be light.’ But darkness doesn’t go away just because the light shines upon it. It shrinks from the light, but it remains. It is… inaccurate to say that evil only came into the world because of an apple. In truth, there was Evil and then there was the Tree.”
Emily looked up, daring to actually try to look the archangels in the eye, but she could hold Uriel’s stare for only a few seconds, Gabriel even less. Only Raphael seemed willing to dim his light so she could plead with him in silence for clarity, for this to not be another story told by Heaven’s light used to teach lessons and instill faith and reinvigorate the angels with purpose. She could not bear another proverb when she needed real answers. Lives were at stake and no life was ever saved by a psalm.
As Raphael looked back at her, his gray eyes- gray like the Earth’s first cloudy day- softened and he seemed to tell her, Please listen. It’s all important. And without thinking too hard about the implications, she found herself wanting to hear more, as if compelled. Later, she would examine the terror of that power, but in the moment she was comforted.
“God pushed the evil underground where it became the roots that grew into the Tree of Knowledge, marring Eden with temptation. When God created man and woman, he forbade them that tree, not because of some desperate need to control them as some would believe, but because it was the one thing there that was not of Him.”
“Did Lucifer know?” Sera asked, now so tense she was like a bowstring waiting to be fired, like she was ready to fly down to Hell and fight the devil himself. “Did he know what he was unleashing when he gave Eve that apple?”
Raphael shook his head. “He was too young at the time. We intended to tell him, eventually, but we never believed he would do something so desperately stupid.”
In that moment, Emily felt a kinship with the fallen archangel. Communication truly was anathema to how Heaven was run- keeping everyone in the dark kept them all so very happy until it didn’t. She clenched her fist into her skirts and tried to remain demure and poised when all she really wanted to do was point that out. Later, she would scream at Sera until her throat bled and maybe this time Sera would hear her because she, too, had been deemed too young, too unfit for the truth. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.
“That first bite of the forbidden fruit bound the Root, as we came to call it, to Eve's soul, liberating it from the Tree. So long as Eve lived, however, evil would spread, tainting the paradise God had built. She was cast out of Eden alongside Adam and from there…” He cringed. “Gabriel?”
“Everywhere she went, everything she touched went tits fucking up,” Gabriel snarled, succinctly.
Michael went on, as if bolstered by his brother’s sharp words. “We had already banished Lucifer and Lilith at the time when Eve finally died. She was not the first soul in Hell, but she was the most powerful at the time. So long as Eve’s soul remains in Hell, the Root is sealed away, but the Root is cruel and vengeful. We had to be sure.”
“There’s only four of us today for that reason,” Uriel snapped, practically launching herself at Sera’s desk, leaning over it to glower at her with her teeth bared. There was a deep anger in her, deeper than whatever drove Gabriel. It was as if she was disgusted with the very sight of Sera and Emily, asking questions, demanding answers out of them when they had no right. “Jophiel, Selaphiel, and Barachiel fell making sure they bound the Root to a garden, just in case anything should happen to Eve.”
Michael cut in before the female archangel could start hissing and spitting further. Like Gabriel, she seemed to have lost everything but anger in the time she had been away from Heaven. “As such, Eve became the custodian of the Root. It is her and it isn’t her, but who knows how it has corrupted her thus far. We have sealed ourselves away, preventing her from seeking vengeance on us, but in our absence, we believe she may have turned her rage entirely to Lucifer. The Root has reason to hate all of us, but Eve’s rage is only for him and Lilith.”
There was a heavy, tense silence between the seraphim locked in this tiny room, changing the face of Heaven with only their words. Finally, Emily spoke up, voice soft to hide her own mounting rage. “So what does that mean?”
“It means that if Lucifer sealed his power, then there is evidence to suggest that Eve, driven by the Root’s desire to take her vengeance on us for sealing her away, would try to take that power for herself. We would not be here right now if we didn’t have reason to believe she succeeded.”
Sera’s hands flew, again, to her mouth to stifle another gasp- or maybe a scream. Even Emily, angry as she was and getting angrier by the minute and hating it because it was still a new, tumultuous emotion that made her queasy, could not bear to see her beloved sister in pain and reached out to wrap her arms around her waist in a comforting gesture.
It was she, not Sera, who asked. “So what do we do?”
Michael turned away from the window to finally regard the lesser seraphim. “We lock down Heaven. We observe the situation until we know for certain.”
Emily could only think of Charlie and Lucifer and all of those poor souls. Her grip on Sera tightened like she was trying to pull her towards her side and away from this madness. Raphael’s calming effect could keep her from lashing out, but it could not stop her from feeling horrible about what was being suggested. “And if the Root tears apart Hell in the meantime?”
It was not without sorrow that Michael replied, “That’s a sacrifice I must be willing to make for the good of Heaven.”
☠
There was only one rule given to Lute when she was manifested out of stardust and miracle in the Crucible of Creation that formed all Heavenborn by the seraphim who had been tasked with making the first human soul inducted into Heaven’s court comfortable- do not ask him about Eve. And Lute, crafted to serve and to question nothing, found this to be an agreeable arrangement. She had no interest in the life Adam led outside of Heaven, only in ensuring that his eternal life was satisfactory.
The fact that such work went into cushioning his landing where no soul after would ever receive legions, audiences with the highest echelon of angels, and power beyond anything a mortal soul should be able to accomplish was not something she was created to think on either, but it certainly did numbers around Heaven once more and more souls were around to see the disparity between Adam and the rest of them. Her job, at that point, was silencing them until no one was talking about it all. It was fine. He was the First Man. Of course he deserved preferential treatment.
It was speculation on Lute’s part that Emily was created because she was a gentler touch in silencing the confusion before it became dissidence.
But even then through all that chatter and questioning before Heaven settled into its new normal, no one ever asked about Eve. She was a taboo subject, an albatross around the neck of Heaven. It was as if everyone knew upon entry to never so much as breathe her name, like somewhere in the spiel at the Gates, it was whispered under St. Peter’s breath that they didn’t bring up the E word.
Lute wouldn’t have thought about her at all had Adam not been the single, solitary person in all of Heaven who seemed to want to speak her name into the open air and see what would happen. Some days, early on, he would get so drunk that he would scream it until Lute had to find some way to distract or silence him. She was not proud of the advances she made- they weren’t becoming of someone of her station- but sometimes kissing the voice from his lungs was the only way to quell his misery. Perhaps she was the cause of his debauchery, because when he began to seek out that sort of comfort from her, she was reticent, believing those first few times to have been anguished desperation and that it wouldn’t be good for him for her to continue. He began to seek it from others, instead, glutting himself on desires of the flesh and Heaven, knowing that his happiness was key to a secret that even the current Seraphim didn’t know, allowed it. The Speaker had made this ruling claiming it came from the archangels, who had simply left, and Heaven, bound by law, committed to following what was given to them, regardless of the true reason for it. Angels don’t question- they follow orders.
And then the Exterminations happened and Adam suddenly had reason to go into Hell. There were hours where she would lose sight of him among the carnage and later she would learn where he went- to the Garden, to see Eve.
If he still truly loved her or if he was only following the lure of the forbidden, Lute couldn’t say for certain, even to this day. Without a shadow of a doubt, she knew that she had no feelings for him and she had figured it out before this moment when Eve, blessed with the power to destroy him, finally took out all the pain she had endured out on him.
And Lute knew then why no one ever spoke of her. There was a rot in that monster, something truly evil. She was smart to run away while she could.
But she didn’t return to Heaven with her tail between her legs. The other Exorcists fled through the Gates and Lute hung back, waiting. While the dust cleared on the battlefield, Lute was the first person to venture into Eve’s demesne, screaming at the top of her lungs for her to give him back.
“I know you’re not gone!” She howled. While those roses in her garden still bloomed, red and bloody and awful, she couldn’t be gone. Not fully. “Bring him back.”
It wasn’t becoming of her to be standing there in full armor, near-tears, and screeching like a harpy into the open air. It wasn’t becoming of an angel to have loved her charge so much that she would crawl back to Hell with only enough pride not to get on her hands and knees and beg for him to be returned to her. She did it anyway, because history repeated itself and history always began in a garden and a taste of the forbidden.
And then, out of the silence of the Garden, there was a familiar voice. “You rang, Danger Tits?”
She whipped around and there was Adam, helmet on, as fully realized as he had been barely an hour before. A gasp caught in her throat, choking her. She flexed her fingers, eager to reach out and grab his cossack, but he deftly stepped to the side of her reaching hands.
“Hey, hey, now. Don’t wrinkle the duds, bitch. And stop crying. You know there’s no crying in demon slaughtering.”
Lute sniffed and turned away to hide her shame and wipe her eyes. “I thought you were dead.”
“Schyeah, that was fucking gnarly, but it’d take a lot more than that to kill the biggest dick in Heaven. Fuck yeah!” He pumped the air with his fist. “Hell of a way to serve the divorce papers. Hah.”
It had to be him. No one else could be that utterly irreverent in the face of the horrors that had come down on them. Voice still quivering, she tried to compensate for it by standing taller and straighter. “We should return to Heaven to report this.”
Adam paced among the roses, strangely at home there, as if he had always been here, as if some part of him was still longing for a breath of Eden. He didn’t touch a single thing, instead keeping his hands folded behind his back, tucked underneath his wings, as his masked grin took everything in with wicked delight. “Not so fast, babe. You need to return to Heaven, but I need to stay riiiight here. Just for a tic, just for a mo’. You understand, riiight?”
She didn’t, but she nodded anyway. Adam might not always be clever, but she trusted him to have a plan. “What do I need to do when I get back?”
“Wait for my signal.” He snapped his fingers. “Actually, I got this crazy feeling that shit’s gonna get fucking wild upstairs, so I’m gonna do you one better. I’m gonna give you a buddy to take with you. You’ll like him. He’ll keep you in contact with me.”
He pointed in a direction, towards where Lute knew there to be a tree once, because she had seen it when she came to spy on him and Eve long ago. It was gone now and in its place…
“I don’t understand, sir,” she said, furrowing her brows, doubt creeping in for the first time.
Adam hovered near her, close enough to touch but not close enough to brush against her. She had to clench her fists to keep from reaching up and grabbing him, something in her hindbrain knowing, for absolute certain, that if she did, this would be over and she would never be able to see him again.
“You don’t have to understand. You just have to do what I say.”
She had been created for this purpose. Why would she do anything else?
“Of course.”