“A moment, an eternity earlier, I would have known it for blasphemy, for damning ambition, independent of Heaven. I would have known! But in that instant his logic was perfect. How could anything less come from such a creature? In the shadow of Elohim, he seemed worthy to do it. He seemed like a god. His glamour was so great; I wanted him to be God.”
Lucian picked up the tea ball and stabbed it into his cup, sloshing water into the saucer.
“Did he know it?”
“How could he not? The assumption was—unspoken, of course, but put forth in suggestive and sultry thought—that those of us who followed him would be something greater as well. He would be a god, and we would become like him.
“The bulk of the Host stood stunned at the discordant thunder of this break. Still, I bowed to him, as did many others like me. And with that, the fate of a legion was set in motion. Time, not yet created, had begun its phantom tick for us alone. Not that we knew it then; we were caught up. We rushed the throne of Lucifer in all its shining estate there in Eden. It was the seat of a government outgrown, and we rose up, ready for our new order. And we seized the throne, determined to move it. I can remember the feel of it in my hands still. Can you understand, Clay? No, of course you can’t!”
Before I realized what he meant to do, he grabbed my hand, his skin tingling against my palm. I started, but as in the bookstore, his grip tightened. I couldn’t pull away.
“The gold of it was hot, burning glory—the glory of Lucifer. It branded me the moment I touched it”— he squeezed my hand tighter—“melding flesh with metal like skin melting on an iron. But instead of letting go, I clasped it tighter, reveling in the white-hot burning of my flesh, the happy cost of my metamorphosis.”
The tingling in my hands turned to pain. His palms seemed inhumanly hot. And then I felt it: a rush of power, thudding through my veins like adrenaline. The drum of my heart roared in my ears, faster—faster. In another minute I was sure I would have a heart attack.
Or that I could run a marathon.
I heard the demon from a distance now: “I, too, would become something more than the mere angel I was. And this would be my transfiguration. This searing was not pain but alchemy!”
The track lighting, the fliers on the wall, the bins full of exotic teas faded into my periphery. Once, back in college, when I had torn a groin muscle while running hurdles, simple shock and the rush of blood to the injury had caused me to nearly black out. I felt the same way now, except that I was not nauseous, and my vision had not narrowed to a tunnel. In fact, it had expanded, pushing reality to the fringes of my consciousness like curtains sliding into the wings of a stage.
Now came a distant rustle. It grew in volume into the beating of a thousand wings, as though I had entered an aviary ten miles wide, crowded with giant, winged creatures, the bodies too dense above and around me to see anything but intermittent shards of light. Voices deafened my ears, galvanized my heart.
Lucian’s voice came to me: “Our fervor intoxicated me. We would have another god, one who walked among us, granted favors—one of our spirit kind risen to the third heaven where he was permitted but never resided. And we, the interlopers, would rise up with him and set up his throne there. We would come into the presence of our new god, walk upright and proud at his side.”
With demon-induced vision I felt, more than saw, a singular form, his span gigantic over the din. He did not blot out the light as he should have but against all logic seemed to intensify it. And now I realized that the giant form radiated its own brilliance down onto the horde like mirrors reflecting the sun.
Lo, the light of Lucifer!
I was elated, high on a rush different from any recreational substance I had ever dabbled in at college. No designer drug, no hit of pure cocaine could begin to compete with it.
And then the hand clasping mine let go. I snapped like a retracting cord—back to the table, to myself—with a jolt that made me gasp. I sucked air into my lungs like a swimmer surfacing from near-fatal depths. The electric lights in the tea shop seemed as severe as surgical lights in an operating room, and I felt pinned by an abnormal gravity to the hard chair beneath me, my limbs as stiff as they would have been after days in traction. I felt the inexplicable urge to weep; I was too aware of my human shell, the conflated emotions—human and otherworldly—roiling in my gut.
Across from me, Lucian dredged the tea ball through his cup.
“What—what was that?” I demanded when I knew I wouldn’t vomit on the table.
“A memory. History. What once was,” he said, waving his hand.
In the frame of my pathetic human shell, I could still feel the elation, see the body emanating light like spots in my eyes after a flash. I was out of sorts. Dismantled. The urge to weep became contempt. I felt toyed with. As though I had been slipped a drug without my permission—one that had taken me to a state that my human condition could never support or ever hope to reach again except through him.
“I do apologize. I needed you to understand, to know, to feel what my kinship with him meant.”
That’s what it was, that intoxication. I shuddered. If what he said was true, I had just vicariously experienced communion with the devil. I pushed up from the table, sturdier on my legs than I expected.
Lucian spread his hands. “Oh, come now.”
But I picked up my jacket and walked resolutely out the door.
Out on the street I wondered if I was being foolish—if, like a lover ending an argument in a huff, I should turn around and go back. What if this was the end? Maybe I would be rid of him, of this entire thing.
That thought brought me no relief. In fact, it conjured panic. If this was the end, it would close the portal to something, some greater context, containing answers to questions I had not known to ask. Worst of all, I would never know what this had to do with me—a question that had begun to eat at me. Would I wander around half-cooked after this, knowing there was something more, the access to which I had thrown away? And would I be haunted by his words—the words that cycled through my mind at night until I wrote them down simply to rid myself of them—indefinitely?
I returned to the tea shop, unsure what I meant to do or say. But the back table was empty, one of the girls from the counter already gathering the cups, the pot of water, the discarded tea balls onto a tray.
As I left again, his words pursued me in his absence, a specter at my back whispering visions of heaven, of the devil, in my ear.
5
My hands burned, seared by the throne that threatened to blind my vision and melt down my wings, but still I held on. I was strong strong and weightless, as though I had come from a place with five times the gravity of this one. And there was Lucifer, spanning the heavens above me, his light so bright now that the wings of the others were nearly translucent with it, their bodies white conflagrations so that I thought, We, too, are transformed. And I was broken by gratitude that I should feel kinship with that splendid creature. It was a new and marvelous identity that swelled my immortal chest.
I wasn’t the only one. I clamored with equally awed seraphim and archangels, their hands grappling with mine. We had witnessed his glory. We had bent the knee. I could no sooner turn back than I could annul the oath of my allegiance. I had undone the contentment of my prior existence with words and acts irrevocable.
We sped heavenward, drawn up after Lucifer like a magnet, inspired by a single will—Lucifer’s. The cosmos had shrunk to this: the expanse of his wings blotting out the sky, his brilliance diminishing the stars, the great power of his ascent piercing its way to heaven.