Shielding his face and eyes, he peered through the searing brightness, barely able to make out the shapes of the sunlike Throne and its enemy.
Questions raced through his mind as he watched and waited for the inevitable outcome.
Then the horrible screams of the divine erupted in the air.
Remy crawled to his feet, stumbling back, trying to escape the oppressive sound that was exploding all around and inside him.
It was the Thrones. Somehow, the Thrones were screaming. There was a burst of light. Remy reacted instinctively, looking away just in time, before his eyes could be burned black in their sockets. When he turned back, through vision obstructed with dancing black spots and expanding circles of color, he saw the most disturbing of sights.
The fire of the single, great Throne had been extinguished, and the Thrones had returned to their individual states. But no longer did they float above the ground, spinning and turning, casting off tongues of fire. Now they simply lay upon the ground like spherical lumps of cooling volcanic rock.
But most horrible was what had happened to their eyes.
Their eyes were now no more than smoldering wet craters dripping with a viscous fluid that formed steaming puddles on the cold ground of Tartarus.
All except for one.
Madach had left each of them a single eye, and those eyes watched him now, filled with something the Thrones had likely never known.
Fear.
For Madach wasn’t Madach anymore, and Remy stood paralyzed by the mind-numbing realization.
The fallen angel’s damaged skin had begun to slough away, revealing new, bronze-colored flesh beneath. He was still smiling—even wider than he had been before—wiping the old, loose skin from the new, muscular form beneath.
Madach isn’t Madach anymore.
Magnificent wings as black as the night unfurled from his back, languidly teasing the air, flexing powerful muscles that had not been used for so very long.
Remy stared with wonder. He’d always thought that the Lord God Almighty had ripped those impressive black appendages from his shoulders before casting him down to Hell.
And then Madach ripped the mask of flesh from his face, and even though Remy already knew who it was that now stood before him, he still gasped at the sight.
In awe of him.
In awe of the Morningstar.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Thrones’ cryptic words finally made sense.
He was never supposed to return here.
And now Remy knew why they were so desperate for him to have killed Madach.
What he’d feared most had happened, not exactly in the way that he thought it might, but it had happened.
Lucifer was free.
Remy hadn’t a clue what he should be doing, and so he stood, frozen in place, watching as the Son of the Morning looked about him, like a new tenant surveying the empty space of an apartment, deciding where the furniture should go.
And then his golden-flecked eyes fell upon Remy.
Remy met that gaze without fear, remembering a time when this powerful being once stood at the right hand of God, but also recalling the rebellion that the Morningstar had perpetrated. The Seraphim nature remembered the battles and the bloodshed as well as who was ultimately responsible, and it would not wither before the angel’s commanding stare.
Sensing no imminent danger, Lucifer looked away, his awesome wings unfurling completely from his back. The dark angel leapt into the air. Hovering above the chamber, he raised his arms, fingers extended. Head tossed back in a cry of effort, the Morningstar began to exert control over his surroundings.
The ground began to tremble, a slight vibration at first, followed by tremors so great that it was difficult stay upright.
Remy felt helpless. Certainly he could have listened to the urgings of his angelic nature, flying up to confront the first of the fallen, but he knew that it would make little difference.
Lucifer was free, and Hell was his to command.
From beneath the dead, the Pitiless emerged. The weapons created from the Morningstar’s essence flew up into the air of the prison chamber to hover before their true owner. Their master.
“These have served their purpose well.” Lucifer’s voice boomed, and Remy watched as the weapons began to lose shape, becoming like smoke that swirled around the Morningstar, eventually being absorbed into his golden body, as he took back the power he had cast off so very long ago.
His already perfect form seemed to become even more immaculate, glowing like a star—a morning star—and bathing the once-icy chamber in his radiance.
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 beginning to crack, huge, miles-long fissures zigzagging like bolts of lightning across the surface. New mountains surged up from the ground where there had been none.
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 millennia of imprisonment had done something to change the attitude of God’s once favored, that he had learned from his monumental error in judgment.
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.