Mammon’s grin only widened. They were getting under the skin of an angel - but not any angel, the precious beloved favorite. Or at least, one that was so adored and given such notoriety through out all of the World. Hell spat their name, others whispered it with terror. But for them, Mammon would utter their name with debauched delight. Gabriel the golden angel, the one who rose above all else - they addressed something as decrepit as them. The sun had risen and now saw the darkness.
Humanity did the same too, did they not? And yet, they had been embedded with God’s favor, with God’s suppose goodness - and that was what it made it forgivable. But what if, upon another lifetime, in another world - it was the creatures made of agony and cruelty that was given a crumb of a chance.
Mammon sensed the trepidation. Even now, Gabriel was adamant of their position and their place. The boundaries of Demons and Angels. But Mammon’s breath was bated. He would fall, they willed it.
“Yes,” Mammon hissed the words with maniacal jeer. “I shall delight in your destruction, Gabriel,” oh how beautifully his name rolled upon their sinful tongue. There was no fear in their choice of address. They would utter their name again and again - watch me do it, they teased from the hollowness of their murky eyes.
Whatever words that were being uttered by the divine angel rang deaf in their ears. For their eyes were only watching the movements of the other’s lips. How they hungered to consume - to swallow whatever good and sanctified they could gnaw upon.
“Tell me more, say it all - whatever rings true in that uninhabited heart of yours,” the provocation never ceased. Mammon had never found such inextinguishable delight. For all the years their existence was, this was the first time something from within the concave of their indifferent self that something sputtered. It was like a light had been ignited in the dark. The more they saw, the more they desired - the addiction was nothing like anything Mammon had ever experienced before. For the angel they willingly burned, welcomed pain with blissful smiles, the sensation flooded them from the crevice of their blackened organs to their finger tips.
The intimacy of their closed distance felt like the unraveling of a mummified corpse. Where Mammon had pulled, Gabriel had pushed. They had never been more pleased. Was this happiness? Who knew, in all the eons of bellicose ruination - it was the first time Mammon felt an inkling of otherness. They did not understand but they were keen on latching upon it like a parasite.
They couldn’t help but laugh.
“I am the void. What is there to take in nothingness?” If there was any humanity within Mammon perhaps the sound of melancholy could be heard. But they were blank. They knew nothing of such emotions, their reason to live was nothing more than just a waiting game. There was no rationale for what they did. There never really was.
Mammon feared not. There was no hesitation, not a single moment of pause in their swift gesture. Their fingers had grasped onto Gabriel’s beautiful chin, bringing it level to their own jaw as their eyes bore in the flaming sun. If he wanted his name uttered, Mammon could certainly conceded - for their lips would gladly taint their refined holiness.
“Look Gabriel, I’ve chosen death.”
Destroy me, they dared. They smiled.
And what would I know about living, he wants to snarl, the violence of the aching cut through each breath and beat of tremoring heart swelling so viscerally he thinks if he were to speak, the sound would be nothing more than howling. To live was the domain of mortals and demons — those free to dip their toes in sin and cavort amidst its shores, oblivious to the tide and how it receded farther and farther with every wave until all that was left was the gaping depth of bottomless abandon. A nadir of abomination, a point beyond even which God could have forgiven you.
Gabriel might as well have been baptised in its waters, his foot skimmed through the shallows, Stygian and ceremonial, for all that he is a being made for it. Did you know that it is possible to make a thing half-hollow? To breathe existence into a being unfinished? Empty and aching, hollow and hollow and hungry.
They speak his name as if in unholy prayer, an inversion of the divine, serpentine and blasphemous. They speak his name like no other has ever dared, like he is something at once wanted and craved and hungered for, and the ember that splutters to life in Gabriel’s throat guts straights from self-control to self-immolation. Inferno splits him from sternum to belly. The deluge of rage and animal fear swells in wildfire, ice-white to the barest part of the flame burning fiercest. The breath catching in his teeth feels slick with gasoline; a single spark would set him ablaze. Is this how the Fallen felt the first time the Morningstar laid eyes upon them, debased them in the arms of hellfire and whispered profanity in their ear like seduction?
( Was that all it was? The hunger to be wanted, to be full and warm and home, to be seen. )
Sickness strikes to the core of his stomach, a lightning spike of fever-pitch ichor threatening to spill from his mouth.
“You could not fathom what it would take to destroy me.” Even to his own ears, he sounds raw, grated thin and threadbare, the syllables of the common tongue morphing and shapeshifting in an attempt to cling to some semblance of humanity. The hearth-fire of fury is a natural state for him, the heat of righteousness singing in molten veins a comfort that sweetens like anaesthesia, adrenaline. But this, this is a different incarnation of rage. It strips him of all that is holy, of grace, sanctity, virtue, until there is nothing left but the animal. Something less than human, something other than angel. It terrifies him, it electrifies. He wants it annihilated; he aches for its obliteration or his own.
“I would raze myself to ashes before I would give you the satisfaction of playing any part in it.”
He watches in mottled bruising shame as Mammon laughs, eyes drinking in the sight not out of repugnance but sickening fascination. A horror that transcends the rational, verging dangerously close to wonder. What being would laugh in the face of oblivion, an eternity of nothingness neither sinking nor rising to any imaginable heaven or hell, trapped in a purgatory of nullity? It pulls at him like the strings of divine providence, the very threads of seraphic purpose meant to guide him from the dawning of existence to the end all of things. What is there to take in nothingness, indeed. A declaration of such surrendered conviction, the thousand-year hollowness in their vacant gaze as if they had carved themselves out of perdition — Gabriel thinks he would like to see it. To taste this so-called nothingness and see if it languished upon the tongue, bittersweet, like his own.
Gabriel bites down on his own laughter as they grasp for him — always touching and reaching, yearning for what they cannot have, this one. Do they imagine they are singular and inimitable, unique somehow in their gravitational orbit of desire, in wanting forever for what they cannot have? Gabriel had hungered for a millennium before the abyss spat them out into existence. And as for the touching — he'll soon put an end to that, too.
“So be it.” And because Gabriel has and always will be a creature born of the beauty and terrible cruelty of sublime irony: “Fiat voluntas tua.” Thy will be done.
He sets his hand upon Mammon’s shoulder, at the aperture of his neck, the other curling around his waist, an imitation of dance if the dance bore the intimacy of lovers entwined or a serpent interminably devouring its own tail. It is the first time he deigns to touch Mammon, and what the demon does not know is that his palms were shaped by empyrean design, made for worship and prayer. It burns to be touched by him, it sears as holy fire, as the sensation of your soul or whatever essence animates your body shedding blood and bone, erupting into its purest form. It burns so exquisite one might be tempted to mistake rapture for pleasure. He takes a step back, and intertwined with Mammon as he is, they diffuse into shadow as a single being.
[ But then no, shadow isn’t quite the word for it. A shadow must be cast, must be rendered into shape and darkness by light. In His domain, there is no light, no nothing. Not even shadow. They slip from reality into oblivion in a heartbeat, but here time is meaningless. And such is Gabriel’s control over his abilities that the metamorphosis of their beings in this abyss arises from nothingness in a splitting of time through absence of matter.
Gabriel blinks, burning sun eyes shuttering open. Mammon can no longer see or touch or hear him, but if they could, it would blind them to see them. In the vacuum of sound, Gabriel’s voice is an echo of thought reverberating through their own thoughts, triumphant and veined with empyrean pride.
The revelation of truth, Mammon, is that you cannot destroy oblivion. But still, perhaps a part of me would like to see you try. ]
