Scorn of Angels (38 page)

Tribunal looked up into the night sky. He could see it all. Not just the stars visible to the eye, which the lights of the burning Earth would have drowned out for any mere mortal. He could see all of Creation, spread out before him: every star, every planet, every speck of dust in between. He could see every living being, from the largest animals in the oceans to the smallest amoeba floating in the black oceans of a world so far from Earth that its star would die before the light of it reached Earth. He could feel the wind on a thousand worlds and see the rain’s first fall on a planet once made of molten rock. He could see all of time laid out behind him and the way the universe had moved since time had begun flowing.

He saw it all, and he hated it.

He raised his hands to the sky—puny, human hands, from the puny mortal shape that had once been his. He would wear it one last time, just to watch it dissolve with the rest of Creation. And when Creation was gone, when God was absorbed into Tribunal, and all was darkness and still, he would build his own Creation.

He reached out, grabbed the threads of the Universe in his hands, and pulled.

The world—indeed, all of Creation—lurched. Tribunal closed his eyes and let his mind wander through the design, examining how God had put it all together. It was beyond elegant, beyond anything Tribunal had thought possible, even in the thousand years he’d spent sitting at God’s side, learning all that he could. Creation was truly God’s greatest masterpiece.

And
there,
in the middle of it, was the one thread that could begin unraveling it all.

Tribunal smiled and reached out his hand.

“Hey, asshole!”

Given that he had ripped out Persephone’s tongue, the sound of her voice caught him off guard. He looked over his shoulder. She was standing again, her arms and legs whole. Her armor and sword, once black, now gleamed green and silver, and her blade danced with a green flame bright enough to blind any mortal eyes.

“Dance with me,” said Persephone. “Fight me. Just you and I. Let’s see who wins.”

Tribunal raised one finger, and Persephone was engulfed in flames. Her hair and wings went up like naphtha-soaked tissue. Her skin began to boil and melt away almost at once, and her eyes exploded in their sockets from the heat.

Persephone laughed. It was a gasping, honking laugh that sent flames into her lungs and threatened to burn her from the inside out, but still, she laughed at him.

“This all you got?”
Persephone sent, her contempt-filled voice mocking him inside his head.
“This is nothing. I did worse than this on a dare in Hell. Amateur.”

“Annoyance,” muttered Tribunal. His finger twitched, and Persephone’s laughter turned to screams.

“No,”
sent Persephone, and even in her thoughts Tribunal could feel the pain she was in. It was exquisite to watch. He smiled at it, enjoying her torment right up until the moment Persephone said,
“Distraction.”

And even as she said it Epiphenia rose up behind Tribunal and wrapped her arms around him.

Nyx slammed her sword against the throne of God, bounced off, roared, and smashed it again. God was there. He was
right there.
Nyx, leader of the rebellion in Heaven, Queen of Hell, chief corruptor of humanity, and torturer of a million souls, had set foot in Heaven against God’s express command. He should be angry. He should be punishing her. At the very least he should be reacting, but God just sat there, staring into space and smiling.

It was the smile that was the creepiest part.

Nyx let her sword vanish. She looked down at her armor, still stained with silver blood—her blood—from her fight with Michael and let it vanish, too. Naked, she knelt down in front of the throne of God and reached tentatively forward to touch the hem of his robe. Her hand skidded across it like it was coated with a thin layer of the smoothest ice imaginable.

“Well, that’s annoying,” Nyx said out loud. “But then, you always were annoying, weren’t you? Asshole.”

She tried again to touch him, this time reaching for his leg. Again her hand skidded away.

“All I ever wanted was free will,” Nyx said, bringing her hands together and closing her eyes. “Was it too much to ask?” She focused her mind. “I didn’t want to run Hell. I just didn’t want Lucifer to run Hell. Or anyone else. Because, really, after a thousand years in the Lake of Fire, they’re all pretty insane.” Slowly, gently, she began to bring the power of all the Angels to bear on the shield around God. “It probably made me insane, too.” Slowly, gently, she applied more and more power to the shield, watching carefully and reaching out with her mind to search for any weaknesses.

“I wonder if you know how bad Hell was when you sent us there?” Nyx said as she drilled her power harder and harder against the shield. “What am I saying? Of course, you did. You’re God. You know everything. Which makes you a right bastard, by the way.”

This was not like the last battle. This was far, far more intimate. This was body-to-body, power-to-power, naked strength versus naked strength. Epiphenia poured the energy from a dozen suns directly into Tribunal, crushing down on both his physical and spiritual self. For the briefest of moments, Tribunal was overwhelmed with the agony of it all, driven beyond all sense and reason.

It enraged him. He wrapped his arms around Epiphenia and used his own power—far, far more than he had ever used in one place at one time. Far, far more than he needed, he knew, but it was such a pleasure to release it. Tribunal smashed it all into Epiphenia, shattering her very being into bloody, jagged fragments that exploded out from him and sprayed the mountains around with flecks of green blood and charred bits of flesh and bone.

That was an indulgence,
he thought. But it felt good.

Nyx felt the moment of weakness in the shield around God, and drove every ounce of the power she had been given, every ounce of her own power, into the shield like a spike driven through a block of ice.

Tribunal felt Nyx drive all the energy of Heaven’s Angels into the shield, and felt the shield crack beneath it. It was strong enough—
she
was strong enough to break through. He realized the mistake he had made putting so much power into killing Epiphenia.
Did they plan that?
It didn’t matter.
I can still stop
her.

Persephone’s sword hacked into his body, smashing down from above and cleaving his physical self into two. The pain surprised him for less than a millisecond. Even as the blade finished cleaving his physical self in two, Persephone was no more than a cloud of silver dust whirling in the winds of the fires below.

It was long enough.

YOU HAVE BROKEN OUR HOLY COVENANT, NYX.

Nyx lay on the ground, hands over her head, face grinding into verdant, fresh-smelling grass and sweet-smelling soil that surrounded the throne of God. God rose from his spot, the blinding white light that was his presence shining through the bones and flesh of Nyx’s arms and filling her so full with joy and terror at once that it seemed she would explode from it.

I’d forgotten what it was like to be close to
him.

God’s presence wasn’t overbearing like Tribunal’s. It wasn’t the sort of power that pushed one down or threatened to overpower one. God’s power was all encompassing and when in his presence, one became not only filled with his power and majesty, but filled with the knowledge that one was
part
of that power and majesty. That God resonated within every fiber of one’s being, and that every fiber of one’s being resonated with God. He was, and, therefore, all other things were.

How exquisite this is. How
right.

But right now, he was very, very angry.

In the burning valley in the mountains of South America, Tribunal looked up past the sky, past Creation, and beyond it into Heaven. He saw God rise from his throne, saw the shield around him shatter, and saw God become once more aware of Heaven.

But only of Heaven,
thought Tribunal.
Not Earth or
Hell
.

He turned the power he had been using on Heaven away from there and sent it instead into Lucifer’s Descended, who were still hunting the last of Nyx’s army. There were half a million of them, and every single one received a share of Tribunal’s power. The Descended roared out in joy and desire as the power flowed through them.