Without any warning, explosions sounded and came to life behind the sky. The moments of my life, all the memories fell away and showered down on me like a thousand colorful fireworks. Covering my face with my arms, I turned around in the water, but found myself kneeling down in a familiar room.

This was my room, when I was younger, when everything began to fall down from their airy ideals and became harsh and heavy reality. It was different, though. It didn’t feel familiar as it had before and always would have been. Instead, it felt very hollow, very empty. The curtains were drawn, so I had no idea of what time it could have been, and it was cold here, like the water before. There was a suffocating feeling of loneliness in the room, and the ceiling light above flickered before shutting off completely. I moved to reach for a lamp I’d had before, but there was a suspicious stirring in the room, and then there was a whisper. Freezing, I tried to make out the words the voice was saying, but it somehow managed to grow quieter, and I couldn’t pinpoint where it came from. The whisper seemed to be everywhere in the room. Instead of chasing for the sound, I let it play out in the room, listening intently as it rose to a full out roar. There was something very familiar but also very distorted about the voice. It was young, and it was screaming raggedly, and I swore I could almost feel the pain of having screamed the voice out on my own vocal cords. The voice, circling around me and echoing almost ominously back and forth in my head and to my face, finally made itself clear to me. The light above flashed brokenly as she suddenly appeared before me, seething. She was pushing her hands against my shoulders, forcing me down onto the floor as she went on a tirade. She was screaming in my face and in my ears, over and over, the words I used to torture myself with, and some part of my felt the pain and the sting of each of those individual words, but I wasn’t that person anymore, and the person screaming at me now was only fourteen years old.

There she was. Fourteen-year-old Amor with short and rebellious hair and fresh scars decorating her small arms. She was screaming at me, but not seeing me. She was crying, but she was also furious, and she didn’t know why. She really wouldn’t ever figure that one out. Turning my face to the side, I gazed at her arms. The scars were fresh. Each and every single one of them, even the scars that lay one atop the other. All fifty-seven scars, by the time I had turned fourteen, were evident on both arms, and I know if I lifted her shirt, I would see three long and angry gashes on her stomach as well.

There was an odd mixture of love and pity and compassion and sympathy and empathy and at the same time, an overwhelming loneliness, coursing through me as I stared at the puckered marks. To my horror, they each opened up and spilled fresh, dark blood, and my own scars, though vastly faded, throbbed simultaneously with pain and longing. Resisting the stealthy, dark thoughts, I turned to look back at her. She began to beat my face, and though I managed to deflect the blows, save for a few, I remembered her, and I remembered the pain, and the memory of her was agonizing at a distance. Pushing her off, I stood, and she pounced on me, almost knocking me back down, but I did for her the one thing I wished someone had done for me back then.

She had wrapped her hands around my neck, and I remember that feeling vividly. I remembered wanting to kill the person I had become because I knew that she was no good, that she would never be good. I’d felt so bleakly about myself that I’d convinced myself several times that it would be beneficial to the world if I had just offed myself because I knew I would eventually destroy the things and the people around me.

Thinking about it, maybe I was right.

But I couldn’t indulge that sweet bit of self-hatred. It was very clear to me then how they were trying to get to me, how they were trying to corrupt me.

Her hands on my neck, stealing the air from my lungs, I fell back to the floor, and my head knocked against the wood hard enough to black out the world. Though she was strong and she was probably actually killing me, I stared up at her with a measured and absolute expression. This was probably the best chance I had at reconciling with myself. I wasn’t about to waste it, even if it meant she might kill me in the process.

As the black dots punctured and grew within my sight, I kept her teary, bloodshot eyes in focus. Opening my mouth and dragging in a breath of air, I pushed her off of me and wrapped my arms around her frail shoulders again, and I put her forehead to mine. Though she fought me, I stared deep into her eyes and said, “How you feel now is real, and it hurts. It doesn’t stop hurting, you just get used to it, but it does make you a better person because it makes you want to be better. You find things that make it worth it, trust me. You know you will, too, or you would have killed yourself a while ago. You just need to get through to the other side to see it.”

She froze in my arms, then, and the suffocating loneliness that had been present, even while she was here before me, fell away. There had been a surprising truth in there that I hadn’t acknowledged until I spoke it out loud.

Staring at her then, this look of surprise and shock etched on to her face, I was reaffirmed again that I was alone. I was by myself, but I wasn’t by myself, and somehow being here with just me—whether as my manifested self existing separate from my present self or because I was here reclaiming myself now—I found peace. Right then and there, I was enough for me, and I didn’t ask for anymore.

Her tears had stopped, and there was something deep within me that was shifting and crawling back, trying to find its way home again, and the fourteen-year-old me suddenly disappeared from my arms. When she disappeared, there was a sort of tranquility that settled over me. Maybe ‘tranquility’ wasn’t the best word to use to describe it, but there was a stillness within me, and the waters in my head seemed to settle just long enough for me to catch my breath.

I was me, broken and all, but I was still me, and I could put myself back together however I felt. I could be whoever I wanted, even if that meant destroying the world or saving it, but that was my choice to make, and mine alone. This was me; there was no changing that.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Pythius’ voice screamed angrily. “All these years of you being a depressed, self-loathing piece of shit that does nothing but take up space, and all you have to do to get over it is say some bullshit pep talk? Are you kidding me?”

The light in my room blinked out, and when a light came back on, I was in a cave similar to Astaroth’s floor, but I was alone then. Looking up and around I asked, “Is that it?”

A thousand different voices exploded to life around me. They began to scream the same words that screamed in the background of my own thoughts every day. I heard them in everyone’s voices. The darkness, the odd cavernous place that was neither here nor there, nor really anywhere, all of a sudden just seemed like a big empty stage. The voices of a thousand people rang relentlessly in the depths, echoing back and forth, bouncing off of each other savagely and unapologetically, but I could hear what they were all saying.

“How could you do this? How could you let us down? You were our only hope. You’re terrible. You’re disgusting. You aren’t good enough. You don’t deserve the light. You’re worthless. You’re a waste of space. I can’t believe you did this. You’ve ruined us. You ruined so many lives. You deserve everything bad that has happened. You don’t deserve to see the light of day. You deserve to die. You should kill yourself. You should cut yourself. You won’t amount to anything, and all you do is forsake everyone around you. You can’t do anything but be there. What do you contribute to this world? There’s nothing special about you. You’re just here. You should punish yourself. You should . . .”

All of these voices echoed back to me as my mother, my father, Jo, Azazel, Vance, Agatha, Bond, Eleanor, Alana, Marce, the old man, my teachers, my coworkers, my friends. Then there were the distorted, tortured voices. There were the voices of the people I’d come across, the voices of the people I hadn’t been able to save, the voices of people who I would eventually disappoint if I hadn’t done it already. Each individual voice was someone from my life that I know I had let down or abandoned at some point, whether it had happened or would happen, but despite all of this, I was calm. The stillness within me held of its own will, gripping tight to protect the shattered pieces of who I had been, protecting the pieces of me that were trying to come back together. In between the pieces of me that fell apart and the pieces trying to crate someone new, there was the fiery crackle of the person in me that would never change. Like a mountain to the sea, I was unmoved.

Still awash in the endless voices berating me for things I’d already harmed myself over too many times in the past, a quiet spark ignited within me. The spark quickly and suddenly flared to frightening life. It was a delicious, terrifying sort of fury that wasn’t just mine alone, but what seemed to connect Azazel and I.

“Is that all you’ve got?” I asked quietly, feeling some part of me slip away as a part of her took my place. “You’ve lived thousands of years, you’ve seen me through all my lives, and this is all you have for me?”

Looking up, all around me, the cave fell apart, collapsing under the pressure I was forcing out. In a second, everything was gone, but I wasn’t standing in a pile of rubble and debris. I was standing in a white room, just like I had at the beginning. The ropes had fallen away from my skin, burning up and disintegrating. Sitting across from me was Belial. Her arms were extended out and in my direction. Belial looked at me bewildered, confusion on her face as she opened his mouth to speak, but I surged on her suddenly, grasping her face between my hands, putting my face close to hers as some part of my sanity gave in, and I screamed, louder than any of the voices were screaming in my head, “You’ve watched me live and die for hundreds of years and this is all you can slap together? These words are what I sing to myself at night.”

Her hands shot up, but with a blinding speed, I caught them both in my hands and twisted savagely to the side as I gave in to this primordial fury I spent so long suppressing. I saw it her as I’d first seen Azazel, but she was much more brilliant and dangerously gorgeous. Her body engulfed in flames, her eyes glowed white, and she had always been there, been with me, but I’d never given her life, recognized the emotions she brought on. Having suppressed her for so long, she gathered energy on her own, and it was likely because I had Azazel’s wing that she was able to do this.

This person, this entity that overtook me and began to savagely tear at Belial. She was the embodiment of my true and unrecognized anger, but it wasn’t just mine. It was the accumulation of lives lived and lives taken. This was my burden to bear now, but it was a creature years in the making, and by the time I had ripped enough of Belial away from her own body, my fury still hadn’t eased. Demons flooded the room in an instant, pulling at me and trying to overcome me, but my body was no longer my own as I gave in to the fury and let it all out.

As more of me stepped away, she came in to my place. She seemed to nod at me as we passed each other, and then there was darkness.

 

My feet were freezing. I imagined this must have been my normal waking mind from the water that covered the ground. The ocean in my mind had gone away then, receding back and away and finding someone else to drown, I guess. In this darkness, I sat alone, and before me were the shattered pieces of what I assumed was myself. I was tired then. I was too tired to want to do anything else but look at those pieces. Raising my hands to my face, they looked smooth and unchanged. My arms were flawless.

I guess I can’t cut my metaphorical self, hm, I thought to myself.

“No, no matter what you do to your physical body, your soul will never carry it along,” someone spoke. Their voice echoed gently, and looking up, I saw Azrael with the mirror pupils standing on the other side of all the broken pieces.

“Why are you here?” I asked, looking up meekly.

Looking around, he sat before me and said, “I exist in two different places now.”

“How?”

“When you told Azazel the truth about what Azrael had done, it broke her.”

“Yeah, it broke me, too,” I muttered, rolling my eyes slowly.

“No, it shattered you, but you didn’t break from that,” he clarified. “It hurt her so much it strained the connection between you two, but it didn’t break you.”

“Then what’s this going on here?” I asked, gesturing to all the glowing pieces. Azrael chuckled sadly and answered, “That’s not you.”

“It’s not?” I asked, leaning in to examine the pieces more closely. He was before me suddenly, staring at me with large, keen eyes, and he said, “You’re cracked, but not broken,” and in his eyes, I saw myself as I was in this place. My face was mine and Azazel’s, or maybe it was just Azazel’s since there were two bloody triangles under my eyes. My face, though, was like porcelain. A delicate smattering of cracks spread across my face and down to my neck.

“The person out there in your body isn’t you, either,” Azrael said again, and then there was a different image. It was me, writhing ferociously in a demon’s grasp and breaking free and tearing it apart with my bare hands. My body was covered in dark blood that wasn’t mine, and as each demon came along to subdue me, I just tore through it effortlessly. My eyes were all black.

“Who is it then?” I asked monotonously. Shrugging, Azrael said, “I don’t actually know. It came from Azazel, though. That might be the embodiment of her corruption but it’s strange.”

“How so?” I asked as we watched my body rampage more.

“The reason why the Fallen try to corrupt people is because when someone is corrupted, they’re broken, like how Azazel is right now. When they’re corrupted like that, there’s a byproduct, a sort of tainted piece of the soul that the Fallen consume to enable them to possess the body. When that corrupted piece is produced, it’s normally small and docile. They have no will to go on, but yours, this one is not just large, but it’s angry.

“I can only assume the reason why is because you two are of the same soul, each time you are reborn, the corruption she faces accumulates and is contained in you. This was bound to happen at some time,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Trippy,” I said monotonously.

“Trippy, indeed,” he nodded. Staring at myself rampage a little while, I really felt nothing.

“What are you going to do about it?” he asked suddenly.

Looking past him then, I asked, “What am I supposed to do about it?”

“You aren’t supposed to do anything. You were born with the ability to make choices. It’s up to you what you want to do.”

“Can I not do anything?”

“Yes, you can sit here and waste away and shatter like Azazel did,” he murmured, gesturing to the shattered pieces of what was at once Azazel. They were still glowing in the blackness of the space we were in. Staring down at them, not quite knowing what to do, bits and pieces of various memories flickered across the individual pieces. Crouching down, I looked at them a little closer, not quite knowing what I was looking for or what I might have expected to find. Above me, the image of my rampaging body went on, and I found, to my surprise, that the same rampage reflected itself in her shattered remains.

“What’s this?” I asked, watching myself through the pieces. Azrael came to crouch beside me, and he said, “You and Azazel share the same soul. It only makes sense she would be seeing or experiencing the same things.”

“Mm,” I responded, still staring blankly as my body went back to the place where everyone was being held captive. That’s right; I wasn’t the only one in this game. Despite the numbness, the nothingness that had enshrouded me, there was a tinge of guilt that sparked somewhere within me. As I watched my body continue to fight and tear demons apart, left and right, I had the vague notion that although I was devoid of emotion, emotion was not gone from me; it was just somewhere else. It was in this corrupted byproduct of years of living and growing and darkening that somehow taken over my body.

“That isn’t me,” I murmured to myself, as if reassuring myself that I was never truly capable of such destruction. I wonder how much of me was actually me and not the residue or consequence of dozens of other lives lived before me, or even the millennia that Azazel spent on this world.

“No. That is not you,” Azrael reaffirmed, and then to my surprise, he asked, turning to me, “Who are you, Amor?”

I looked up at him then, a sort of dulled shock attempting to pierce through the haze of nothingness. He was looking at me with a steady and unwavering expression, and in his eyes, I saw myself looking back at me. There I was, looking and feeling so small and yet so terribly broken, and I was broken. The cracks on my face could attest to that. As I stared, tracing the cracks and broken veins that stretched across my face, there was a vague thought that hit me, a memory of a quote I had read at an obscure time.

“We are all broken. That is how the light gets in,” I whispered, the words being pulled from the depths of the memories of the life I had lived.

That’s right. I had lived a life before all this. Before I had gotten to this place, before I had been the one to save the world, before I had endangered my friends, before I had been betrayed, before I had ever even met Azazel or thought of her, I was living my own life. I was alive and an angst-ridden teenager finishing her last year of high school with no idea of where the after thought of it would take me. I was a person who, besides the early life crisis, had a family, and had amazing friends and who, despite the uncertainty, had a lot going for her, and I was who I always wanted to be. I had become a sad person, a happy person, an angry person, a funny person, a nice person, a mean person. I had been all of the things and all of the people I had wanted to become and had not wanted to become, and I had always lived to tell the tale of how I changed, because this was my life, and it was mine to live.

“You are who you are,” Azrael spoke as I simultaneously said, “I am who I choose to be.”

Jumping to my feet, something exploded outward. The blackness suddenly rushed away from me as I found myself slamming right back into my own body, and I gasped harshly, as if I had been holding my breath for hours. The first thing I noticed was that my hands felt slick and oily. The next was that it was hot and burning my skin, and the third thing I felt was soreness and pain coursing all throughout my body. Falling to my knees, I was panting and gasping for breath again, this time feeling as if I’d run a marathon and deadlifted the world immediately after. I was back in the cave, and the pond had been partially drained so that I stood at the bottom with the water up to my ankles.

There was a mixture of relieved sighs and tensing gasps all around me, and I looked up to see I had been surrounded by six of the Lords of Hell, and I groaned out loud.

“Some choice timing,” I grumbled, feeling a part of myself come back to place.

“Pythius, what happened?” the woman, Merihem, called out to him. He was standing directly in front of me, tendrils poised and ready, and he said, with narrowed and uncertain eyes, “I don’t know.”

“Satan, honey, how’s that transfer going?” he called out, still watching me with steady eyes.

“It’s moving. These are some tough products you brought along,” he called back. Behind me, I heard someone relax and straighten, and still exhausted beyond understanding, I struggled to keep my crouched position on the ground.

“She’s of no harm, now,” Astaroth called behind me, walking up leisurely. “The corruption is gone from her.”

His arms were suddenly around me then, picking me up bridal-style and looking down at me with crimson, intimidating eyes. There was a sort of dangerous lust that radiated off of him, and I shrunk away from his gaze in his arms. He let out a low chuckle and said, for only me to hear, “You were gorgeous as your corrupted self, but I think I like this innocent angel better.”

Squirming, I tried to wiggle out of his grasp, but I was too weak then, and he just laughed as he walked me to a dais on the opposite side of where Jo, Bond, and Agatha were.

Weakly, feeling more of my strength slip away, I asked, “What are you doing to them?”

“Ah, don’t worry about them, my little dove. Worry about yourself,” he purred, setting me down on a stone slab. It was cold beneath my body and I tensed slightly before succumbing to the exhaustion.

“If the corruption left her, where did it go then?” Mammon asked, his voice sounding gravelly and rough.

“Take a wild guess, idiot,” Pythius spat, and as if on cue, Azazel’s disembodied roar echoed through the cavern. “Bring the harpy.”