Location: Third Floor / Closed
Date: 10pm, June 24th, 2017
Trigger Warnings: Gore, blood, implied death, crucifixion mention
The prickling of Lucifer’s omniscience had of course intimated that tonight’s soiree was going to have a less than pleasant outcome; but “unpleasant” and what this was represented as entirely different. In Lucifer’s room, it seemed almost all of his ‘sensors’ were out of whack; he could only imagine what Raziel was feeling, or perhaps the once-was angel was more used to the lack where new senses now filled him—or perhaps his senses were unaffected. Lucifer was skeptical of his room, knowing by now the markings of a Horseman’s plaything, and if this was anything to gauge by, the belief wielded by the first two had led the third to have quite a lot to toy with. Naturally Ms. Thomasˆ was probably loving having God and the Devil in her claws. Lucifer set his mouth into a firm line, considering his artfully arranged surroundings, which were altogether not distasteful, but this wasn’t the time for it.
Slowly, the room changed, seeming to accentuate his discomfort. His sensed were a little dulled as a Devil with a pantheon in need of a boost—but this room was worse. Everything in it maintained its shape and structure, but became unfamiliar: from where Lucifer stood, from beneath his shoes, eked out a soot dark dust that swarmed to engulf everything in that selfsame darkness. It wasn’t an unknowable darkness; it wasn’t the void, empty of any and everything. No, simply, everything was lifeless and ashen. Ash fell from the ceiling like a mockery of snow. When Lucifer went to find his footing, hand trailing for stability against a wall, his fingers came away coal black, and the wall shifted away after he touched it. It wasn’t a melting; no, it was more like a cracking. Like the beams decided to separate and re-merge in a different way. And then suddenly, the room was impossible to navigate.
Lucifer was on the outskirts of an inky labyrinth, the walls unforgiving and cold, the texture of tree bark. Every few steps he took, the walls shifted around him, his sense of direction getting skewed further, the light fading and becoming harder to ascertain if he was going forward or back; all he had was his sense of touch and these strange walls with their burnt-out textures. The ash continued to fall, sometimes getting in his eyes, but he managed to find a red string by his feet: the only splash of colour, no more sturdy than a yarn. Like a lifeline, Lucifer grasped it, seeing it as the only information he’d been given as to a way out. He had to get out—the end of the world wasn’t going to happen with the Devil and God trapped somewhere in a maze. The idea of the world quietly taken over while the deities were shoved into a nouveau Tartarus was, indeed, the stuff of his nightmares. Would the yarn make it better or worse?
“Hello?” he called out into the darkness, both with voice and mind, to sense any reply. Nothing came, the sound swallowed up in softness, the way a scream folds into a pillow case. Choking back a bit more emotion than was useful at the moment, Lucifer made his way onward. He’d seen the roils of Hell; surely, he could withstand what the string brought him. A sharp turn showed Raziel hanging in a crucifixion pose, but upside down, as all the blood rushed to the head of his corporal form, eyes lolling and bulging, lips turning blue around a tongue fat from lack of water, unable to speak, only to cough around the drifting ashes. Immediately, Lucifer tested to see if it was only his senses, or also his powers, which left him in this space; it seemed he could use telekinesis, but barely; not enough to cut his brother down with only his mind, but enough to pry a part of the bark of the wall and fashion it into a blade after a fashion.
After cutting Raziel down from the wall, Raziel stared at him with empty eyes and a thankless mouth, following like a shadow as the walls shifted again. Lucifer returned to following the string; down a flight of stairs he went, stairs that went down and down and down, seemingly endless, and he almost grew tired of the downward climb. Raziel was soft-footed behind him; Lucifer looked back to ensure he was there, chiding himself as Orpheus, who should have known better—but Ms. Thomas was hardly the God of the Dead, neither in guardianship nor in power. Lucifer would reign, he was determined. Finally, a small plateau came to pass, and on it was Renee, and Babylon, and Abaddon—all ties to a stake inside a boiling cauldron, their skin pruning and boils beginning to form. What meal were they for? Lucifer didn’t have the time to piece it together, but he freed these women whom he looked after like daughters, unable to stop himself from saving them.
He stood on the side of the cauldron, his foot blistering from the heat, and undid their knots, their ropes. His feat would heal, in time. Faster than most angels and demons—but not fast enough to be painless as he continued his descent down the staircase, the trio of girls fell in line behind him, soundless and thankless and soft-footed with Raziel. The string became more taut as he rounded a bend and the stairs dropped off; he couldn’t even see where he stepped, but he had to trust he was meant to keep going, that something would carry him along. The pain underfoot let him know this to be true, each step leaving a bloody trail behind him, though the floor was unknowable. And then he saw Leviathan, his best friend, his confidante, the only person in the whole cosmos he knew he could trust without hesitation nor question. And she was being lowered into the nothingness in a coffin with a glass top, but her the strength of her fists did not seem to change her trappings.
Lucifer jammed his bark-shiv into the side of the casket where its closure made rest; he wouldn’t trim the ropes lowering, for fear of losing her forever. Instead, he pried open the coffin, the makings of the place having an effect on itself, until he could separate it with enough space so Leviathan could pry herself out. She didn’t speak when she was freed; she looked through him and joined her place in the rank and file behind him, wordless and heedless and soft. Lucifer felt half-mad at the thought of it, but pushed away the questions that made him uneasy: Why weren’t they happy being free? What was this place? After all, there was no time for it. Who else did he need to save? Who else was in this wasteland of dust and ash? Was this what the apocalypse truly looked like: not nothing, but a pale horse of nothing? An almost-something? An eternal memory of a nightmare imagining a once-was dream of life?
And finally, there was the center of the labyrinth, with the red string having found its inception. It was a circle of falling ash and nameless tree bark, and those who he saved formed an outer circle, their shadow selves with shadow mouths and soot dark feet making black noise. Lucifer barely registered it, because in front of him, holding the other end of the twine, was Talia, her face lovely and serene as she held a beating heart in her teeth. It seemed to be his own, beating in time with what pulsing he could hear that was so loud thick it was deafening, the way quiet can be when surrounded by more silence. She pressed her teeth closer together and Lucifer gasped in pain. But behind her, there was a door. He didn’t know who this Talia was, but he couldn’t believe she would hurt him, not like this. She wasn’t made for that, it would unmake her; it couldn’t be true. Lucifer turned to warn his friends—
—only to find that their mouths were bloody, too. Saving others never did save yourself.
He looked from them to Talia, her eyes bright and loving, her hands reaching, inviting, saying, Just stay here; haven’t you had enough of the fighting? What has saving this world ever done for you? All of your friends become enemies. But here, the war’s already lost, and what a relief for it. Here, stay with us, stay with me, my love, stay with me, where I can never die again. And he felt himself reach for her, the way that you always go on reaching for the one that you love—the one you can never be rational about, the one who always has final command over your heart, no matter how much time has passed—he went on reaching—for her, always her—
—but he saw the ash falling on his hand, and he looked at her not for the spell she was but for the soul he remembered, and for the first time in a long time, he allowed himself a tear, a tear for all of the betrayals he’d felt, and all the more he know he’d yet to endure, and the loneliness that would always be a part of his burden—and he reached past her, to the door.
Location: 205 @ Hotel California
Date: 10pm, June 24th, 2017
Trigger warnings: blood, death, hospitals.
WEST SIDE MASSACRE SPARKED BY RELIGIOUS ZEALOTS. Is that what happened? Magda wonders, and then the wondering hurts too much, like the strain of thinking only makes the suffering worse, the headache like an anvil forge. Some of it is blurry—pieces of it are missing. Magda can’t remember how she got here; what the plan was. It sounded, in the distance, like someone was blaming the Church for a massacre, but that couldn’t be right. Maria would have had a plan—a good plan. It was probably a stunt. A ploy by the Horsemen to fuck with them. Or maybe even Satan, if he was having one of his mood swings from angry to angrier. WEST SIDE MASSACRE SPARKED BY RELIGIOUS ZEALOTS. But there’s blood on her clothes and something has to account for that.
Her hands are handcuffed to a hospital casket, pretty much, and something has to account for that.
She heard the police officer giving a report of the incident; if dozens are dead and angels and demons were fighting, the apocalypse was here. Where was Josh? Had he chosen well? Had there been a choice? Magda worried for him with her whole heart—until Maria was wheeled in. Maria never should have been wheeled in. Maria was better than all of them, smarter, braver, more clever. Magda had some brains but nothing like the schematics and plans Maria dreamt while she was sleeping, that half-handed natural talent for pragmatism. Maria wasn’t the one on the gurney next to you, that’s not possible, that’s not possible. Magda leaned over, strained against her restraints, the pain and Maria’s glassy eyes both inducing vomiting.
Something wasn’t adding up.
Magda never got a prophecy wrong—mostly because she refused to interpret them herself. I’m a conduit, she says. I can’t know what it means, she says. Always. Always skirting the blame, the responsibility. Always handing it off to Maria to make sense, because that was the plan, that was the action. Magda had the bare bones of an idea; Maria fleshed it out; Josh fought for it. That was what God had given them. Magda didn’t mistake prophecies because she didn’t interpret them in the first place, so if she had, she would have been 110% sure. She wouldn’t have gotten it wrong, couldn’t have—couldn’t have sent everyone to their deaths—Magda hyperventilated, breathing so fast she was heading straight on into a panic attack, all the thoughts swirling too large to manage, too fast and spiraling into overwhelming.
But that underscored it.
That small, distant voice that could sometimes talk Magda down from these attacks before they got out of hand and she curled fetal and rocked herself and tore strips of tissues into confetti of gridlocked pressure—that voice was saying something helpful: You couldn’t have gotten it wrong. If you’d gotten it wrong, Maria wouldn’t have gone along with it. Or, if she had, and it was wrong, there wouldn’t be a fight like this, you would have miscalculated a time or a place or a thought, not caused a civil war, not caused angel and demon to turn on each other unless they were going to do that with or without you. And look, the clothes you bloodied, weren’t you wearing that dress to a party? Didn’t you go to—a hotel? And then the door marked 205 came back into her memory, and once she had a marker for what not-this felt like, this felt different.
Magda could fuck up a lot of things—in some ways prided herself on being the fuck up of the Trinity, the black sheep of Heaven—but she wouldn’t fuck up a prophecy, not in this way, not to this degree. She was literally put on earth for one thing and while she could fuck up everything else, in her one task, she had to be confident. Had to trust her instincts. Even if it meant eventually coming to terms with a scene like this—so be it. She knew she couldn’t be that wrong—and the weak restraint on your right wrist reminds you of it. Maneuvering your slight hand, Magda freed one hand, and then, subtly, the other, slowly removing the IV, not yetin a private room, not yet hooked up to a heart monitor—she wasn’t important because it wasn’t true. Flinging off the scratchy blanket, she headed for the emergency door, marked 205.
