Her voice was in my head next when she spoke, In this place, you cannot use your gifts.

Pressing my lips together, I thought, How do you know?

I have not healed since I have gotten here, she answered, her voice sounding weak in my mind. This is the only connection that cannot be cut.

Even as she thought that towards me, I could feel her focus slipping away. Closing my eyes, I reached out to her with my mind, and I asked, Where are you?

I could almost feel her hands in mine and how they seemed to be slipping away as she struggled to hold tight to my words and her answer. Before her message came across to me, I caught a glimpse of what she had seen, what she was seeing now. She was somewhere completely shrouded in darkness, but there was a light far, far off in the distance. From her eyes, I could see myself standing in that light, staring in her direction. My wing was slightly raised, but it was no doubt me as I knew it was no doubt her somewhere in there.

“This place,” she spoke aloud, gasping, “plays on the weakness of perception. You will not find me by looking. You must feel for me . . . you must feel for me in the darkness.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked out loud.

Still seeing myself through her eyes, she said, “You have already suppressed the echoes.”

“I did?” I asked, and once I’d noticed it, the sound of my voice came reverberating back to me, loud and insistent. “Ah.”

“Focus,” she called out in a ragged voice that carried to me from the darkness. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes. With the image I’d seen through Azazel’s eyes, I focused on myself, on the image of myself standing alone on that floor. It was strange, and difficult, being present through her eyes while feeling myself in my own body. For instants at a time, I was existing in two different places at the as I focused on myself through her eyes, and I focused on her through my body, but the connection wavered and teetered into one perspective or the other. I was either staring at myself, or I was standing with my eyes closed.

Each time I fell into that delicate equilibrium, I held on tightly, desperately, but the harder I grasped for the connection, the more it slipped away from me.

I let out a cry of frustration, which came booming back to me like a volcano. Madison was speaking to me then, asking, “What are you trying to do?”

“She’s in here, somewhere out there,” I said, gesturing jerkily to the far wall we were facing. “She said this place won’t allow me to use my gifts, that I have to focus on my connection with her to find her, but I can’t hold on to it for very long.”

Madison was quiet for a moment, gazing pensively in the direction I gestured towards. Without turning to me, she said slowly, “What if it’s like sleeping?”

I gave her a look that was a cross between bewilderment and an indignant scowl. “What?”

“How do you sleep at night, Ama?” she asked, turning to look at me. It didn’t feel like a serious question, so I didn’t give her a serious answer.

“With plenty of regret after I’ve cringed at all of my past mistakes and actions.”

“Amor,” she snapped, giving me an annoyed look. “How do you fall asleep?”

I stared at her a moment, confused and uncertain of the direction she was heading. I didn’t fall asleep easily, that was for sure, and I couldn’t tell myself to sleep. Normally I just—

“Drift off,” I answered slowly, the realization dawning on me. “I just let it come and I follow.”

She nodded at me, an encouraging smile on her face. Nodding back at her, I closed my eyes again and focused on Azazel’s presence. In the forty-five seconds it probably took for Madison and I to exchange those words, her energy had diminished even more. If she had been a flashlight in the darkness, she was now a dimming candle. Beating back the jump of anxiety, the urgency of the situation leaping to my mind, I focused on her candle-light presence. Again, I flickered into sight through her eyes and fell back into my own body, tottering between her and I, but instead of latching on to it, I allowed myself to fall into the connection, to not force, but to flow with it so that I easily moved between her consciousness and mine.

Slowly, almost uncertainly, I began to walk. Azazel watched me, and I watched myself, all the while making sure I was directly in her line of sight. She remained quiet as I approached, and though I knew I was managing to walk in a straight line, I couldn’t see myself moving any closer.

Trying to keep my mind clear and focused, untethered by the need for control, I forced myself to recognize the futility in my movement. How was I supposed to get to her when the movements didn’t matter? I was walking, and my body was moving, but I may as well have been on a treadmill. Somewhere on the far outreaches of my consciousness, her words sounded just loud enough to rustle and echo through the water of my thoughts, and I remembered just briefly what she had said, “the weakness of perception.”

Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be moving with my feet . . .

Without thinking, my wing unfurled and suddenly hurled me forward, and in Azazel’s eyes, I came hurtling toward her quickly, past all of that distance that separated me from her. In the blink of an eye, I was standing before her. There was a blindfold tied around her eyes, and her arms were shackled above her head, her feet bound beneath her. Her wing was out and chained, just as I had been when I first awoke, but she’d been through more than I had. Her body was covered in gashes and cuts and bruises, and there was a dried pool of blood that shimmered gently beneath her. My heart dropped as I sank to my knees in front of her.

My hands shooting to the blindfold, I asked, trying to keep my panic in check, “How were you able to see me? What happened? How did this happen?”

“You are covered in blood,” she said weakly once the blindfold had been removed. She took a second to really take in my whole appearance now that she could see me more clearly.

“It is not yours.”

Glancing down at myself, I said with a frown, “Arlo killed himself on the knife I had.” A vicious pang stabbed through her as intensely as it did me, and she turned her head into her shoulder. Letting out a sob, she asked brokenly, “Why?”

“The demons—someone told him if he killed me that he would get to see his son again.”

In a quivering voice, she cried out, “Oh, Arlo.”

“Azazel, what happened to you? What did they do to you?” I asked quickly, trying to distract her as a familiar darkness welled up within her as it did me. Now was not the time to succumb to an episode.

“Pythius,” she spat. She bowed her head, and carefully, I positioned her to tilt it back. There was dried blood from her nose and mouth, and her eyes were almost red where it should have been white.

“How were you able to see me?” I asked again, reaching for the shackles.

“I felt for you,” she breathed out, trying to lick her lips. “The memories imbued within you beckoned to me through our wing.”

“Of course,” I murmured, jingling the shackles. “What did they do to you?”

“They extracted my blood,” she said quietly, her eyes looking glassy.

“Why did they do that? Why didn’t I feel anything?”

“I do not know what they want with my blood, but I do know that this place has special properties that suppresses intangible connections like ours. The only thing that was intact was our spiritual connection, and even that was a strenuous feat for me,” she answered. “We must find the others and get out of here.”

“I don’t know what this place is or how to get out,” I said, finding that the shackles didn’t have any particular clasp that allowed them to open or close. Looking back down at her, I asked, “Do you know what this place is?”

“Yes,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “We are in the Tower of Babel.”

“The Tower of Babel?” I asked, confused, “Wasn’t that destroyed?”

“In the human’s bible, yes, the Tower was destroyed. Their bible claimed man to have built it, but it was a creation of the Fallen. It was an attempt to unify those who had been shunned from Omnis’s graces, but it was never destroyed.”

“Omnis?”

“The One That Is All. That is the name I know your god by.”

“Okay, but this place, this is the Tower of Babel? Why are there only nine floors?”

“Each floor is governed by a Lord. Each Lord has complete control of the floor and can warp the perception any way they choose.”

“So this is an actual nightmare,” I groaned quietly.

“Ama, look, there’s that rope on her wing like yours,” Madison murmured behind me.

“Turn around,” I instructed Azazel, and with difficulty, she managed to expose her wing more to me. Sure enough, there was a black pulsing rope tied around her wing, and it dripped with her blood, shimmering. I let a drop fall onto my hand, and I held it close to my hand, and I asked, “Do you know what this floor is? Who it belongs to?”

“This is the floor of Olivier,” she answered, sagging against the wall, “The Destroyer of Angels.”

Looking at her then, I said slowly, as if trying to feel the words on my tongue in the truth that they unfortunately were, “I don’t think we have the same memories.”

“No, I do not think we do. I surely do not share the same memories as you have of your life,” she said, “Why is that important?”

“No, Azazel, I mean, I don’t think you have the right memories of your life,” I said slowly.

Looking over her shoulder at me, she asked, “What does that mean? How would that be possible?”

Before I answered, against my better judgement, I cut the rope free from her wing, and I threw it far to the side. She took a deep breath then, and a weight seemed to be lifted off of her shoulders as she attempted to stretch out her wing.

Taking a deep breath, I stated as calmly as I could, “This is the floor of Abaddon.”

Her head did not snap to mine as I thought it would, but instead, she turned to me deliberately, her eyes squinted slightly as she stated just as calmly, “That is not true.”

“It is,” I said in a measured tone. “When I escaped, I saw I was on Belial’s floor, and when I looked at the elevator buttons, there were nine names, and this floor said it belonged to Abaddon.”

“You have my memories. You must know that it is impossible for this floor to belong to Abaddon,” she said, suspicion creeping in her voice.

“Azazel,” I said slowly, “I know who Abaddon is, I know he is your brother, therefore he is an angel, but this floor belongs to someone named Abaddon.”

“No,” she said, her voice rising slowly in intensity, “that cannot be true because there is no Lord named Abaddon. There is Pythius, Asmodeus, Belial, Satan, Beelzebub, Mammon, Merihem, Astaroth and Olivier, but there is no Abaddon.”

Swallowing, I said assertively, “Azazel, there is Pythius, Asmodeus, Belial, Satan, Beelzebub, Mammon, Merihem, Astaroth, and Abaddon. If each of these floors is ran by a Lord, there is no Lord Olivier.”

“You must have been tainted by this place. There is no Lord Abaddon,” she said stubbornly.

“Azazel,” I snapped, forcing the image into her mind. She gasped then and fell back against the wall, as if I’d pushed her, and she said, “N-no, that cannot be.”

“It is,” I snapped. “Do you even remember how your wing was severed from your body?”

“Y-yes, of course,” she stuttered, uncertainty creeping into her face then. “It- it was Astaroth, you see? During the final battle, it was him—he severed my wing from my body.”

A second later, the image popped into my mind as she forced me to see. We were flying high in the sky, and her eyes were set on Astaroth below, and he had a spear in his hand. He let it fly far and although we could have dodged it, for some reason, we didn’t, and it struck our body straight through, the wing falling off and away as I plummeted to the ground, and Azrael—my Azrael—finished what I could not.

Gasping back in my body, I stumbled back, and a sadness crept up through me as I looked down at her.

“Azazel,” I spoke softly, “No, that is not what happened to you—to us.”

“Yes, yes it is,” she insisted, trying to stand. “Astaroth took my wing from me.”

Shaking my head, I said, “No, Azazel, Astaroth did not take your wing.”

“Yes, he did!” she suddenly exploded, fighting against the restraints. Her eyes stopped seeing me as her anger flared and fire erupted at her feet. “Astaroth was the fiend who took my wing from me and—and he is the reason I was cast from my home and the reason I was forced to walk this world beside man and the reason–”

“Azazel,” I yelled, surging on her and grabbing her hold of her shoulders, “Look at me. Look at me,” I drew an arm back and smacked her hard across the face.

“How dare you?” she bellowed, her voice reverberating across the entire floor, her rage revamping and exploding out at me.

“You don’t even know who did this to you! Who created me!” I yelled, looking deep into her coffee brown eyes.

“Astaroth!” she shouted, fighting against her restraints and getting close to my face. Fire licked the ground beneath me, but I didn’t feel it. My wing on my back was twitching uncontrollably, reacting to her wrath and desperate to follow suit.

“No,” I said quickly, taking a deep breath and stepping back. “You were not struck by the Lance of Astaroth.”

“How would you know? You are not me! You were not there! You are a human who stole my wing and–”

“I am you, Azazel,” I said stoically, gazing into those eyes which were almost painfully identical to mine. I hadn’t wanted to see her as me, but seeing her now, seeing how she saw me, finding myself through her, I knew then what I was and who she was. “I knew it when this wing sprout from my body, and I know it now. There isn’t a line between you and I. I’m you if you were born a human. I’m the possibility that got to see it out. I’ve been you since the day I was born. I have what you are missing.”

“What do you mean?” she asked sharply, halting for a second to stare hard at me.

“I know who split your soul, Azazel. It was not Astaroth. I never thought to ask you about the things in your life that happened in the past because I thought you and I had the same identical memories, but now I know that we don’t have the same memories. The memories you think you have are the ones that your brain fudged to make sense, but that isn’t what happened. Maybe what happened was too painful for you to remember, but I know who did this to you and who created me,” I said in a breath, looking past her as part of my own identity slipped away, melted into the realization of who I actually was.

Maybe she had felt this concession, too, as she reluctantly turned her attention to me, the fire dying away as she made sense of what I had said. The memories of her life she didn’t recall in vivid clarity were very fuzzy to her, but she assumed it was because she had been earthbound so long. She didn’t consider, or didn’t want to consider, that she lost those moments when her wing was severed from her body.

“Then who was it?” she asked suspiciously. Looking at her, I saw the wounds still hadn’t healed, and her wing was still oozing her shimmering blood. She had been through a lot, and I had, too, and I didn’t want to have to relive all that pain I experienced when I learned her life when Agatha had first guided me down this path, but I didn’t have a choice. She deserved the truth; she deserved to know what had happened to her, despite how much it would hurt. My hands clenched, thinking about how everything she’d done to this point, all she worked toward, all she suffered, was all because of the same person. My wing ached quietly, feeling the ghostly whispers of her pain. I took a deep breath, feeling my heart break as I recalled the memory.

She lived through it, she survived it, and she was here now demanding it. His face jumped to me, his beautiful, dark face with his big eyes and sharp jutting cheekbones and ebony hair. For a second, I thought I heard the echo of his voice, his memory’s voice, whispering to me from across the distance between her mind and mine, and he was telling me that she could handle it. But I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how anyone could survive that kind of pain.

“It was Azrael,” I finally choked out, feeling my heart clench as I remembered his face, his heavenly spear tearing through her chest, cutting through our heart. “Azrael was the one who severed your wing and split your soul.”

She was silent for a few moments, her mouth agape. Gazing at her steadily, I tried to gauge her reaction, but what happened next was beyond what I could have expected.

Her eyes whitened for a split second, but then blackened in a flash and her jaw snapped shut. Fire erupted from her wing as she cried out, “You lying heathen! Azrael would never betray me! He is my Soul, he would never!” Her wing began to beat wildly, lifting her from the floor and against the chains. She fought ferociously against the bindings, slicing open her skin and straining her arms and legs. “He would never, he would never, he would never!”

I stood, looking up at the space above me, feeling my shatter and feeling each individual piece falling away. I only ever hoped to experience that pain vicariously through her memories, but I was her. I was her if I had been born an angel, and though I did not experience him cutting off my wing, at the same time I did. The pain—the betrayal I felt was beyond anything I could have been put through by Pythius. This—this was beyond words, and here she was, of course trying to deny that he could ever do something like that to her. Him– the love of her life, the one made for her, her beloved, her soulmate.

If I ever wondered what I would look like as a crazy, avenging angel, it was how Azazel looked right now. Though she was fighting against the chains, harder than she ever fought before, she was fighting off the dawning realization—and losing—as I forced the actual memory upon her mind. Just as she fought against the chains, she was fighting against me, too, violently pushing back the intrusive memory, desperately trying to preserve her image of Azrael before he split her soul in half, before he split us and ended up creating me. I gazed at her sadly, hoping but knowing she wasn’t going to let the memory, the truth, come to actualization in her mind unless I forced it so. Wearily, I reached out to place a hand on her forehead, and she froze instantly as we both relived her last moments before she fell into that deep slumber, that coma.

 

It was she and I, in the sky where we belong. Azrael was beside us, and we were back to back as Astaroth and the human king Nimrod shot giant flaming projectiles at us. I pushed Azrael roughly away from me as a flaming rock shot between us. If he had said a gratification, I did not remember, but I tucked in my wings and plummeted to the ground, boring straight into the crimson eyes of Astaroth, fury and greed glowing in what was left of his soul. He drew back his arm, of which held a long, black lance. It would absolutely penetrate my skin, it could kill me, but I was the Angel of Destruction, the Maiden of Arms, and this lance was nothing but a toy to me. I readied my shield and drew back my own arm, and just as Astaroth launched the lance, heading straight for my forehead, my body faltered as something icy and all too familiar stabbed through my back, through my heart.

Out of shock, my arm slackened, and the shield fell from my grip. I turned around mid-freefall and looked up to see Azrael’s hands free of his weapon, of Glasia. I looked down at the spear protruding from my chest, which had turned my skin to ice upon contact and was now spreading from the wound. I could not see his face, for he was silhouetted against the sun, but I could see him up there looking down at me, and then I was in someone’s arms. It wasn’t a hard crash, but the spear came crashing down through me as I came descending into awaiting arms, and I let out an agonized cry.

It was Astaroth’s crimson eyes that were looking down at me with a strange expression, a sort of compassion, but I couldn’t feel anything. There was an immense amount of pain, but it was quickly falling away to nothingness as the ice spread further throughout my body, devouring all the heat within the container as I had designed it to. The pervading feeling, even surpassing the nothingness which I thought to be the death of my body, was the raw throbbing ache of my heart in my chest. My heart had turned to ice, pierced through by the spear, but there was another sensation that not only struck my heart, but knotted itself up my guts. It was a knotted and tense, piercing and panging and throbbing feeling and it made me utterly nauseous but washed through me in unrelenting, agonizing waves. Heartache. Is this what humans killed themselves over? Is this what they tried to avoid at all costs?

My eyes drifted back up to the sky, a tear leaking from my eye. The sun shone brightly overhead, almost oppressively now against my dying body. The sky ebbed in and out of focus, the sound of war quickly dying down, or maybe it was my senses escaping me. I wondered if Omnis could see me now, dying in the arms of a monster. Astaroth was saying something, but I couldn’t hear him anymore. There was blood rushing in my ears, despite my heart having frozen. This was a strange feeling. The rest of my blood tried to move, but the blockage in my chest, the iciness spreading, kept it flowing in the same places. The blood circulated desperately my fingers, in my arms and legs, in my head, trying to get out before the ice halted all movement.

Astaroth was carrying me somewhere. I wondered briefly how he might have felt, seeing me like this. I always knew he’d had an irrational infatuation with me, even before he fell. We were slowly moving now, or maybe we were moving fast and I was just dying. Dying was an odd and sad and lonely sensation. I had come into this world with my brothers, but no matter who I was with, no matter whose arm’s I was in, it would be my soul alone that would depart. I knew this could happen, that I might die here, but I never thought it would be like this, betrayed by the one that I loved most.

Astaroth handed me over to another pair of arms. Familiar arms. Strong, brown arms decorated with the tattoos of the last Destroyer. Azrael. I turned my eyes to look at him, into his wondrously hazel eyes that shone copper in the sunlight. They were as bright and suffocating and enamoring as ever, and despite how much pain I was in, I reached a hand up to stroke his beautiful face. Omnis’s greatest creation, I liked to think. So compassionate and so powerful and so loving and so destructive and everything I was and simultaneously everything I was not. My perfect other, my better half, the piece that makes me whole, my soulmate, my Azrael.

And I began to weep as I asked him, “Why?”

He touched the spear, and it instantly stopped its icy movement, but he did not remove it. I was still very close to death, and I wondered how he could stand to see me this way. He carried me away from the battlefield, deep into a forest to a spot we had discovered and made our own, where we kept the last of God’s mystical creatures, safe from the humans and the Fallen alike. I still remembered the first time we’d decided to harbor them. Wisps brightened upon our arrival, but they all turned red upon seeing my limp body in his arms. They were murmuring, and the further into the clearing we drew, the darker the sky became.

“My Lady, My Lady, My Lady,” they all whispered. “My Sir, My Sir, what has happened, what has happened?” but Azrael was stoic as the ground lifted in the middle of the clearing, a makeshift dais. He delicately slid the spear from my abdomen, but I could not feel it anymore.

He set me down as gently as possible. Still as loving as ever, I saw. Flowers bloomed all around me. Azaleas. Azaleas had been my favorite.

I hadn’t stopped crying, and the flowers only grew larger and stronger around my head as my tears leaked into the dais and the soil. I never cried. How strange this was. The grass seemed very soft here.  Looking up at the sky, which was now a cozy twilight, the azaleas around me began to glow silently. Beautiful.

I looked over to Azrael, and his face had crumpled as he threw Glasia away from him. Here I was, in this beautiful place, and the most beautiful thing about it had such a sorrowful, agonized look on his gorgeous face.

“Don’t treat her like that,” I finally said. It was quiet, as if this little world had been holding its breath, and upon hearing me speak, the smaller creatures began to sing their tunes in true, my favorite song. He looked down at me, startled, and he said with a crooked, broken smile, “I am sorry, my love.”

Looking up at him, feeling my death hovering just beside me, Demesis, the silent angel that guided departing souls from this world to the next, waited for me at the end of this realm. Her darkness stood out against everything else around her, amassed and concealed her like a shadow that was trying too hard. One of Azrael’s tears splashed against my cheek, then, and I reached up to wipe it away, slowly turned my head to look at him. Demesis could wait.

“Why do you have such a look, my love?”

“I am losing you. My world will grow cold. I will not know happiness until I find you again,” he said brokenly, looking down at me, his face crumpling more. He looked over to the hole in my chest and said, “What is more, I am the one who did this to you. I have taken the love out of my own life, the meaning out of my soul. I have taken you from me.”

And he sobbed into my chest, collapsing into wails and collapsing beneath himself. Azrael never cried. Azrael never broke. Not for anything, and here he was, disintegrating before me, because of me. Despite my condition, I turned onto my side and held him close to my chest as he wrapped his arms around my waist. I was going to die soon, and I no longer cared how or why I was dying. I cared that my love, my soulmate was caving in, falling away before me, and the only thing I could think to do was try to keep him together.

“I have loved you with my entire being in this life, and I will love you with my entire being in the next, and the next, and the next,” I whispered into his hair, sensation finally relinquishing the edges of my fingertips.

“Azazel,” he gasped out, looking up at me, and I could see his eyes as the first time I had ever seen them: hazel like man, and I could feel myself falling in love all over again.

“How amazing that even as I lay dying, I have fallen in love with you again,” I whispered, feeling myself slip away into the darkness, Demesis now laying a hand on my shoulder. “I will love you until the end of time, Azrael.”

“Demesis, no!” Azrael suddenly yelled as his own soul plunged past the plane we existed in and into the one we came from. He reached down deep, reaching for my heart, and I could feel he was reaching desperately for my soul, trying to keep me here, even for a few more moments. My eyes rolled back in  agony as the creatures around us all screamed in high pitched voices.

I was existing in a strange limbo, somewhere between life and death. What was left of my senses came in the whistling screams of the creature of myth. What I felt, what I thought was on my skin, was a warm embrace, a welcoming, inviting touch Omnis, shadowed by the chilly hand of Demesis, guiding me to them. The cold hand of death held on gently to one hand, coaxing me back to where I came from. Azrael’s fiery touch was on the other, clinging to me in a futile tug-of-war, and though I knew I should have gone with Demesis, returned back to Omnis, Azrael’s will, his love binding us together, tore my soul in two, and I became us: Azazel, Angel of Destruction, Maiden of Arms, Second of the Final Trinity, and Amor Elise Johns, high school senior. But I wasn’t just Amor Elise Johns. I was Madison Grier, I was Donovan Cole, I was Haruko Tachibana, I was Paula Castro, I was Lupita Odame, I was Yaya Howard, Abigail Sutton, I was countless and countless people since the final battle, but one part of me had always been Azazel.

It just so happened that the ‘me’ that was Azazel wasn’t born into a body, but rather was born in full. That’s why everything seemed to be happening as it did, because I was here, and underneath the weight of this revelation, I collapsed before Azazel. She was sobbing uncontrollably now, and her pain was reverberated and intensified within me, and I felt different parts of me falling away. Where do we go from here? What was to be done? Where were we to go? Azrael was the one who had severed her wing, the one who created me, and he was the reason she was stuck on this world, far away from her home, from her people, from her love. What was to be done knowing he was the one who caused all of this?