He was looking for answers, not a battle, but he couldn’t look into the hearts of the others. He couldn’t see the darkness growing inside of them, so black and so dense, released now as they fight. A civil war, as humans will come to call it among themselves millennia later, angels on angels, siblings against one another, wings flapping wildly behind their backs, swords swooshing through the air. And Raphael had the misfortune of picking the side of the disgraced, stripped from HER light, HER love – they will be soon. They never stood a chance. And he never craved power. He only ever wanted to understand.
There is nothing more terrible, more vile than marring your hands with the blood of a fellow angel – the streaks of molten gold run like rivers all around, a puddle beneath his gray wing, pierced through with a sword, as he finds shelter in the shade of a willow, pressing his cheek against the rough coldness of his own creation, and waiting. Waiting for his inevitable doom, because he already knows what happens next – the fools, blinded by arrogance and greed, they’ll never win. Not this battle. Not this war.
Raphael was never a coward, but how bitter it is to see them out there, tormenting each other, spilling blood – but what for? Another question that will never be answered. Because SHE isn’t here. They claim that this, all of this, was HER will – and he doesn’t want to believe it. SHE used to be kind, forgiving, and SHE’d never... And then, GOD made them like this, the Righteous and the Deviants, the Rebels who dared to think of themselves as false gods, having forgotten their purpose.
Yet even they don’t deserve such a cruel fate – oh, if he could heal their wounds, all of them, but he can’t. They were supposed to shine their light onto the world beneath them, not shed their blood – and still, he followed Lucifer, his most beloved brother. He followed him into the battle, and he will follow him into the dark. Into the fire.
A figure, clad in white and surrounded by blinding light, approaches, and before his emerald eyes close, as if not to see what happens next, before he surrenders to the mercy of Heaven’s soldier, Raphael remembers – he’s seen this angel before, yet never had a chance to speak to him. And now is too late, he assumes. And it doesn’t make him angry – it only makes him sad, because they don’t know what they are doing. Oh, Mother, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.
“Do it,” he whispers wearily. Or someone else will, and if they don’t – it will be much, much worse the other way around. He never craved death, he doesn’t – but it will be more merciful than Hell’s eternal flames.
