I was floating. I wasn’t flying, but I was floating. I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear. I was existing, but somehow that didn’t feel right either. I just . . . was. Before life took shape, before the idea of me was formed, before I could become anything, become what I was supposed to be, destined to be, wanted to be, I just was. There was no expectation, there was no desire. There was no love, there was no hate, no anger, or hatred, or joy, or sadness, or nothingness, or void. There was just this place, and to call it possibility would be to call it a lie, because it wasn’t anything. It just was, and here I was, in the place, this state, this being. I was. . . I was . . . I was. . .

I am, a whisper came. I am. I am. I am.

“I am Azazel,” I said, existence, being, life, love, anger, hatred, joy, everything suddenly and painfully colliding into me at once.

With a gasp, I opened my eyes. I was lying down on a cold, hard floor, and beside me was the cool, glowing pool. It still continued its quiet whispering, but I could hear them now. I understood, then, what they were saying, what it all meant.

“Welcome back,” a man said from across the pool. Turning my head to the side, I saw the shadow of the man sitting across from me. I didn’t speak, trying to understand where in reality, where in my existence I was. This place finally made sense to me. The words and comprehension were taking it’s time. I had been in a place I could have only ever dreamt of when I was awake in my life. It was a place that I had envisioned too many times with no means of achieving. It was the place I came from before I came to existence, the same place Azazel was born from, as was Azrael, Jo, Vance, Abaddon, Agatha, Bond. . . the place every living creature came from before life gave them form.

The man stood and walked toward me, and I watched him steadily. As he came closer, more of him came into sight, and it hit me almost instantly who this man was.

“You’re Azrael,” I said, almost surprised. The light of the pool bouncing off of his face, he looked exactly as I had first seen him, or as Azazel had first seen him. He had the same almond colored skin, the same high cheekbones, hazel eyes, and midnight black hair, which was long and unruly. My heart gave a tight squeeze as it suddenly hit me that he looked exactly like Vance. He sat beside me as I sat up, and he said, gazing into the pool, “You are not incorrect.”

“But I’m not totally right, am I?” I asked, looking at him. It was almost startling how identical he was to Vance. The only difference was that his eyes were a worn copper instead of hazel. I almost wanted to reach out to touch him, to see if he felt the same way Vance did, but there was something off about him. There was a sort of transparency, not so much that I could see through him, but as if he wasn’t really there. I could see him, but I couldn’t feel him.

“No, you are not completely correct,” he said softly, looking up at me slowly. When his eyes fully met mine, I was shocked to see that his pupils were gone. In their place was a sort of silvery mirror, and I could see myself reflected in them almost perfectly.

“I am Azazel’s memory of Azrael.”

“Her memory?” I asked, looking away from him quickly. There was something about my own reflection . . . I couldn’t look at myself.

“Yes. There are many things that I lack that she was unable to recreate.”

“Like what?”

“She could not seem to remember the shape of his wings, or their color accurately enough,” he said with a small laugh, and then I realized he didn’t have his wings. His back was as bare and broad as Vance’s. “And she couldn’t bring herself to remember the markings of a Destroyer.”

“Ah, right. You don’t have those blue triangles on your face. Why not?” I asked as I glanced up at him. Silently, he brought his hand over to my face. I could barely feel his touch, as if it was just the whisper of what it actually was. He gently lifted my face, and I looked at him as he looked just below my right eye. His thumb slowly traced the bloody triangle as he gazed wonderingly at it.

“She could never see him as such.”

“How do you mean?” I asked curiously. He put his hand back down and turned to gaze at the pool again, and he answered, “She couldn’t see him as a Destroyer, as someone, something that took life. To her, he gave life.”

“Right,” I murmured, gazing back down into the pool. “Where are we?”

“This is her mind,” he murmured. “She doesn’t come here often.”

“She doesn’t?”

“No, because I am here, and I am a painful reminder of what she has lost.” I looked over to him wordlessly, but he was still gazing into the pool. A sad, resigned look had come across his face, then, and he said, “This is all she has left, anyway. It is just me and her memories. I was the only one she actually let live.”

“How do you mean?”

“You saw Abaddon, Artiya, Selin, Sol, and Aion. They were all there, and you know exactly who they are and how they are. She could have created them all here with me, but she didn’t. I don’t think she could bring herself to that much pain,” he sighed. “She’s already been through so much,” he added quietly.

“Yes, I know,” I murmured, silently sifting through the hundreds of years’ worth of memories I’d just seen. “These memories . . . why can I only see some of them?”

“Just as you do not remember every waking moment of your life, she does not remember every waking moment of hers to. The memories you were able to see were the most important to her, the ones that helped shape her into the person she is today. Some other memories you did not see were ones she simply chose not to remember.”

“Why?”

“They may be too painful for her,” he answered simply. “Even when she was a Destroyer, she did many things she was not proud of that she had no choice in, as I know you have seen.”

“What does it even mean to be a Destroyer?” I asked, shaking my head quietly. Azrael, or the memory of him, sighed and looked up to the ceiling of the cavern. He really was a lot like Vance, even in how he moved, even in the ghostliness of his touch.

He said quietly, “That, I cannot tell you. At a time, I knew exactly what it was and what it meant, but she changed that, and everything else about me, about Azrael.”

“What do you mean?”

Without moving his head, he looked at me with his tired, serene eyes, and said, “Love changes things. It changes people, Amor.”

“But . . . she’s an angel,” I whispered to myself. In the memories I’d both consciously seen and the countless others that had streamed into my head, some things had been made clear and evident. One of those was that Azazel and Azrael were Destroyer angels, the first and only of their kind. Second was that angels did not change, nor did they feel or completely understand certain emotions. Angels did not age, their hair did not grow, their eyes remained the same. From the moment they were created, they would forever remain in that body and shape they had been put into, until a force acted upon them to change that, and even that could only be done by certain and rare means. Without thinking, one of my hands reached up to touch my stomach, where I—Azazel—had been impaled so many years ago. That fateful day she realized they had failed.

Were there scars on her stomach? Did they still ache from time to time as mine did when I thought about them?

“This still doesn’t make too much sense to me,” I muttered suddenly.

“What does not?” Azrael asked without missing a beat.

“Why . . . Why I have her memories? How am I her incarnation? She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

He glanced at me and answered, “She is still very much alive, Amor, in all of her tortured glory.”

I looked at him curiously and asked, “Tortured?”

“There are many dimensions to Azazel that she herself doesn’t understand. That’s what comes from being with humanity for too long.”

“What do you mean? What does that mean?”

“It means man is the favored of the Lord’s creation for a particular reason,” he said ominously.

I looked at him, feeling even more confused. God had favorites? Maybe, I guess that made sense, but humans? Angels existed, and apparently so did mythical creatures, but why were humans favored? Even in Azazel’s memories, I had not been able to discern the reason for choosing humanity over everything else, but as Azazel, I had followed without question. That had been her purpose: Protect them at all costs, no matter the price. I opened my mouth to ask another question, but a familiar cry rang out in the cavern, and Azrael looked up with a soft smile.

“It’s time for you to go,” he said, not looking back at me.

My eyes flying skyward, trying to figure out where she was, I asked, “Why can’t I see her? Why can’t I talk this out with her?”

“Because this is her world. There is no reason but her own in this place. Find her out there, in your world, and you may be able to talk to her then,” he responded, leaning back on his hands and listening to her scream throughout the cavern.

“Wait, ‘may be’? Why isn’t that a certainty?” I asked quickly, her bellows echoing closer and closer. I jumped to my feet then, my body tensing, waiting for the inevitable assault.

“Nothing is certain when it comes to man, Amor. You know that better than anyone.”

“How am I supposed to get out of here then?” I asked, my panic mounting.

“Back the way you came,” he said simply.

“Which is how exactly?” I snapped. Without saying a word, he brought a leg up easily and pulled my own feet from beneath me. Then I was tumbling deep into the pool again, and I was diving past all of these memories, of Azazel, Azrael, Artiya, Abaddon, Selin, Sol, Aion, Omnis. I was falling through her life impossibly fast, and it seemed almost endless. She had lived a very, very long time, but then I was suddenly falling through someone else’s memories. A woman with black hair and ebony skin and kind brown eyes, and her life. Her mother, her sisters, her father, her brothers, the village she lived, the fire that took everything from her, her
best friend. Onoly Nguiyo. She was the first life I had lived and died. Her death whispered past me quickly, quietly, but I still felt the sharp sting from the blade that had sizzled in her back. It was Ayuma, Onoly’s best friend, that had killed her in the end. She was sixteen.

Falling past and away from Onoly, I was running through Zlata Sergevna’s life, then Jose Gonzalez, Chu Tsai Hsui Xiang, Terrance Naranjo, Envy Adams . . . there were so many lives, all lives I’d lived before and died, that all rushed past me in an instant. Of all of their lives, I felt so many prevalent emotions. Sadness, happiness, anger, fear, solitude, apathy . . . there was something that defined each of them, made them different than the last, and most of them had realized this before they died. It was a terrible end, each marked by the same feeling of betrayal, and I remembered what Madison Grier said. No one had made it this far, and I would be betrayed by someone close to me, just like each of them had. But that wasn’t what caught my attention about their lives.

What caught my attention, what fascinated me, was that the deaths I had lived in vivid clarity in my dreams, the ones that drove me crazy and even brought me to the brink of my life, of my sanity, were mere blinks in their existence in life. What stood out to them the most was not the end of their lives, but rather somewhere near the beginning. It was always their first happy memory that shone the brightest in their life, and it was fascinating. There were so many of them. I’d been lost, awash and disenchanted with the complexity of their lives and the brutality of their deaths that I’d allowed myself to render their existences to drops in an endless river of life, of which the struggle of existing was the highlight. Life was not merely a struggle to survive.

Life had always been so much more than that. All at once, almost too suddenly, I was smashing back into my body, gasping for air as I had the first time. My eyes rolled back into place, and I was staring up at the ceiling before collapsing hard onto the ground beneath me. I was breathing, panting hard and uncontrollably. I had the feeling I had run a marathon, or rather sprinted one, and I was thoroughly exhausted. The blood was rushing in my ears, and it was all I could hear and feel for a moment. All of the blood in my body seemed to be sizzling and simmering beneath my skin, and I felt I was on fire.

“Amor, Amor are you alright?” someone called to me. They sounded as if they were talking over the phone underwater. My eyes rolled lazily to the source of the voice, and I saw Agatha in front of me, a look of concern on her pretty face. My eyes rolled back up to the ceiling as I closed them and tried to pop my ears. I could feel her moving toward me, and she went to touch my shoulder, but she yanked her hand back suddenly. My eyes popped back open, and I looked at her quickly.

“You’re on fire!” she exclaimed, holding her hand close to her chest. I took a deep breath and tried to sit up, feeling dizzy and heavy under the weight of my body and everyone else’s. Feeling my head spin, I groaned softly and brought a hand to my temple. I opened my eyes briefly, just enough to see that my skin was glowing faintly, and I flinched. It felt, then, that the water was draining out of my ears, because Agatha spoke, and I could hear her. She asked, “Amor, are you alright?”

I looked down at my hands, feeling confused, because they were my hands, but somehow, they weren’t. There was something about the pattern of fine lines, the shape of my fingers, of the bones beneath my skin, that seemed somehow different. “I—I think so?”

“What’s wrong? Why do you keep looking at your hands? What did you see?” she asked curiously as I studied my hands more intently. My eyes widened slightly as I slowly realized what had happened to me, to my body.

“I think . . . I think my body changed? I think . . . I think I took all of their gifts.”

“Gifts? What gifts? Whose gifts?”

“My incarnation’s gifts,” I murmured, thinking about Zlata, Yaya, Onoly, Donovan, Madison, everyone I had lived through and seen. Something began to prickle painfully at the back of my neck. My body moved on its own as I tackled Agatha to the ground.

“Amor, what are you doing?” Agatha exclaimed. “Please get off, your body is burning!” Not even a second later, an ornately designed spear came hurtling through the cabin and lodged into the wall directly behind Agatha and myself. She let out a scream and stared at it, wide-eyed and confused.

“That’s . . . That’s Gladio,” she said in a shocked whisper.

“She’s here,” I said in a low tone, jumping off of her, standing over her protectively. A second later, her familiar cry boomed from outside the walls, echoing and vibrating the whole cabin. Eleanor was shuffling somewhere outside of the room, and a moment later she was bursting in, looking panicked and thoroughly confused.

“What’s going on?” she cried.

“Your Lady has just arrived,” I muttered, that same painful prickling circling around my neck. I didn’t know specifically what it was, but I recalled somewhere in the dozens of lives I lived that this was Matthew Goji’s gift. It was more powerful with me than it had been with him, though. He could only feel it sometimes, and it was rare it was this accurate. I could feel her circling around the cabin by the tingling that encircled my neck. Something was making a terrible gouging sound, then, and I glanced back just in time to see the spear—Gladio—wrenching itself free from the wall and flying back out from the way it’d come.

I jumped out of the way, narrowly avoiding it as it tried to pierce through my side. Tumbling to the ground, I rolled back up as I tried to focus on where she was. Aside from the painful tingling around my neck, I was slowly picking up on an intense rage. It was like a growing fire I could feel from a distance, and it approached closer and closer not as she got closer, but rather as I became more aware of its presence and its ferocity. Just as the fire hit an angry peak, something came whistling through the air and straight through the roof, and I backpedaled, the spear just barely grazing me. It slammed into the ground with a force that would have ended me. I looked back at Agatha and Eleanor, and they were looking up fearfully. Azazel’s scream echoed again, her frustration somehow intensifying the heat of her fury.

“What do we do?” Eleanor asked, looking to Agatha. She just shook her head aimlessly, saying, “I—I don’t know. I can’t think straight. She’s angry, and that’s all I know. I don’t know what to do.” A second later, she crouched down, curling into herself as she ducked her head between her knees, trying to hide from the same heat I was experiencing. This was Zlata’s gift. She could kind of feel how people felt around her, especially if those emotions were directed at her, but she couldn’t feel it like the heat I was feeling from Azazel. Besides me, I could feel Eleanor’s fear like an anxious buzzing vibration, and I could feel Agatha’s helplessness like an
odd, uncomfortable malaise.

The spear started to wriggle again, and I thought to grab it and stop this, but it was already out and returning back to Azazel. I glanced at Agatha and Eleanor one more time, and sprinted out of the door. Eleanor called behind me, “Where are you going?”

Agatha yelled from her position, “Don’t go out there! She’s too angry, you need to hide!”

“I can’t just sit here as she stabs this house through with that stupid spear!” I yelled back at them, throwing the door wide open. Outside, it was bright. It wasn’t bright as day, but bright as a cloudless night with the moon full and high in the sky. It took my eyes a second to adjust, but my senses were still tuned and acute as I dodged off to the side, the spear lodging deep into the ground where I’d been standing. I cast my eyes skyward and searched for her, trying to channel that fiery heat and figure out its source, her location.

I jumped forward as three more spears fell from the sky, landing just where I stood. I tripped over my own feet and landed hard on my stomach. Quickly, I rolled to the side as more of the spears came from seemingly out of nowhere, and I felt a spike of fear trip up my concentration. She was actually trying to kill me. Holy crap. This was happening, and she was actually trying to kill me. I scrambled up and kicked myself away from the spot I was in before as more spears landed around me, following my path, but I didn’t get away fast enough.

One of the spears pierced straight through my leg, just above my ankle, and I let out a bloody scream, my vision blinking out for a moment. I turned my head to look back at it, and as my sight returned, I saw that the spear was long and dark, intricate carvings reaching up its length. To my horror, my blood raced along the grooves as the spear seemed to suck it right out of my body. I looked up quickly, trying to keep my wits about me despite the overwhelming pain in my leg. I was trying to find her and make sure she wasn’t nearby or trying to throw more, but part of me asked the question: what’s the point? I was already trapped. I briefly saw her shadow shoot across the brightness of the moon, and another spear pierced through my other leg, just as I tried to tuck it beneath my body. Pain shot up and down my leg as I let out another bloodcurdling scream, and one more spear shot through my arm. I couldn’t stop the tears that spilled over my eyes. I couldn’t even really feel them as my limbs screamed their suffering at me. I looked helplessly at my trapped legs, my almost severed arm. She’d struck me right through my elbow, and my arm looked so limp. I could scarcely feel it over the overwhelming roar of my wounds. I looked forward, knowing I had to try to get out, and I reached a hand forward in a feeble attempt to crawl away, but she landed before me the next instant.

I looked up at her. I don’t think I’d ever been more terrified as every sensation I felt, every ounce of every bit of my agony suddenly silenced upon beholding her image before me. She stared down at me with fiery eyes, and beneath her feet, the grass was burning, blackened. I yanked my hand back because I knew I was burning, but I didn’t feel it. I was petrified, frozen in place by her terrifying gaze. I couldn’t see the whites of her eyes or even the color of her irises. I just saw a pair of red, burning eyes, her face shrouded by darkness, her wing faintly illuminated by the flames that danced on the tips of her feathers.

“You,” she snarled, wrenching the spear from my arm. The sudden jolt of pain forced me to let out a loud cry, and I tried to bring it close to my body, but she stabbed the spear through my other hand, and for a moment, the world blacked out before me again. “I have finally found you, and I will finally kill you, you thieving heathen.”

“Azazel, wait,” I choked out, trying to speak around the pain that took away all my other senses.

“Do not sully my name by speaking it, you godless dreg!” she spat, stabbing the spear further in to my hand.

“Oh, my god!” I screamed, my eyes rolling back in my head.

“I have searched for you for hundreds of years, and I will finally bring you to judgement, wretch. How dare you steal the wing of a Destroyer angel. Who do you think you are?” she snapped, crouching down to grab my head by my hair. “Where is it? Where is my wing?”

“I—I don’t know,” I gasped, not knowing what to tell her.

“Liar,” she roared, throwing my head down and kicking me hard across the face. I was surprised my neck hadn’t broken from that blow alone. “Where is it?”

“Stop,” I gasped, trying to find my grounding and find her face in the swimming torrent of my vision. “I don’t know. Please.”

“Where is my wing, ingrate?”

“Please, I don’t know what to tell you,” I moaned painfully, my world rolling before my eyes.

“If you will not give me my wing, then I will find it within your body,” she said coldly, “Do not beg for mercy. I will not give it.” She stood and pulled the spear from my hand. I slammed my head into the ground, trying to realign my scattered mind as I tucked my arms close to my chest. My neck was tingling painfully, somehow catching my attention despite the pain emanating from both legs and both arms. Her rage was palpable. I could feel it burning my skin from her body, and there was so much pain around me. There was so much happening. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t think, all I really knew was that I was going to die. I didn’t make it to the end. I didn’t get to see how this life of ours—mine and Madison’s and Donovan’s and Yaya’s and Terrance’s; everyone’s—how this life would pan out and end. Maybe this was the end. Maybe this was supposed to be how it ended for us. We had her wing. We were born with it, and all she ever wanted was to get it back and get back home, get back to her Azrael. A quick image of him burst through my mind, and it instantly morphed to Vance’s face, and real tears sprang to my house, heartbroken tears. I wouldn’t see him again. The last thing I’d said was that we’d hang out again when I got back, which meant I’d lied to him, and I never wanted to lie to him.

It was going to end here, and I would never see him again.

“Are you okay with that?” someone asked right beside me. My head snapped up, and I saw Madison Grier crouching down to look at me, her ocean blue eyes hard and critical. “Are you really okay with that?”

Vance’s face flashed across my mind, his smile, his laugh, his touch, his scent. Everything that I knew about him, everything that reminded me of him, everything about him that made him who he was to me, came to life in my head, and that was all I needed for me to realize that, “No, I am not okay with that.”

The point sizzling painfully on my back burned in one spot, and Azazel brought the spear down hard, aiming for my heart. Time seemed to slow down as something within me roared to terrifying life. A fury I’d never known, one that I’d never experienced in my waking life, nor in any of my other lives, erupted from a place deep within me and bursting out through the years of all the time I’d spent on this world, not just as myself, but as everyone. It awakened from centuries of slumber and for a moment, resonated with that of Azazel’s. Identical. She and I were identical in almost every aspect.

The spear bounced away from me with a sharp cling, and my eyes were wide and staring at the ground as I became aware of a new limb. It spread out from behind me, stretching out as far as the muscles would go. I could feel her confusion and aversion, and I saw her feet jump back from me. The hole in my arm and hand began to sizzle and burn, but it wasn’t painful. It didn’t feel good, either, but it as a strange sensation as the muscles and tendons and bone pulled themselves back together. The skin and flesh began to reform, and what at once was agonizing, became numb. I stayed very still, feeling my body mend itself back together, and when I felt my arm was closed, when my hand was whole again, I turned around and wrenched the spears from out of my legs. I didn’t feel anything.

My legs healed faster than my arms, and once they were healed, I slowly got to my feet. I stared at the ground a moment, trying to align my senses, get my bearings, and the blood swam away from my ears and slowed to a steady beat in my body. Azazel said something, screamed it rather, but I didn’t hear her. I was still trying to get my shit together, but my senses were aware for me. That same panful tingling stabbed through my chest, and my hand shot up to clench the spear she attempted to force through my chest. It was odd, as if I was spectating in my own moving body. I was certain that she was using all of her strength on the other end of that spear, but it felt like nothing in the palm of my grip.

Slowly, I looked up at her, and though her eyes were still on fire, I could see past the flames to the coffee brown of her eyes, which were near identical to mine. The memories I had of her life flashed, but they paralleled with my own. She and I really were identical. Through her memories, she and I even acted similar. Her wing was splayed out on her right side, the blood red triangle just beneath her left eye. A light halo of fire framed her right side, and I could feel the fire framing my left. Together, we completed one person. No, I completed her, but how did I do that? How did I complete her? Where in her life, in her existence, did I fit in? I stared at her, studying curiously. I’d never seen or heard anything like this, like us. But then again, not many people, if anyone had definitive proof of the existence of angels, like I did right here and right now.

Her hair was like mine: black and wavy, but hers was longer than mine. Her hair reached down almost to her legs. Her skin was the same color as mine, too. We both had that golden honey about us, but she seemed to glow faintly, just as in my memory—her memory. Her face was almost identical to mine. We had the same lips, the same nose, the same eyebrows. I was afraid if I looked close enough, I might even see we had the same scar beneath our lip. She and I were near identical, except that she came from above, and I came from below.

“What are you?” she snarled at me, jumping back a few feet.

I furrowed my eyebrows, not knowing completely the answer to her question, but what I said next was as close to the truth as I would probably get for a while.

“I’m . . . you.”