POV: Michael
He had been standing at the window since before the stone that made it was quarried.
Roman dawn doing its best attempt at warmth, which was never quite enough -- the light pressing through the high corridor glass in long pale fingers that smelled faintly of the city waking, petrichor and bread, and fell just short of warm.
He had been making his peace with almost for long enough that peace was the wrong word for it.
More like a standing arrangement.
The window, the almost-light, the specific ache of a thing that resembled the garden the way a photograph resembled a person. He visited anyway.
Some faiths were more honest in their inadequacy than others, and he had found that particular honesty sustaining.
He had been praying for him.
Not abstractly. Specifically, with the weight of someone who had been watching forty-three metres below a desert -- watching the almost-smile develop from nothing across eleven days of a woman handing one word at a time to something that had been in the dark before there was dark to be in.
Grass. The way his palm had pressed flat against it, learning. Here. The way the word had landed on him.
Michael had stood at windows and watched and the watching had grown roots in him, load-bearing roots, the kind that made gladness and grief indistinguishable from each other in the chest.
Then the name arrived.
Not into the corridor. Into him.
Vothanael ...
Three syllables in the register that predated the Word, predated the instrument of making, predated the first act of everything....
And they arrived in his sternum not as event but as recognition, the way you recognised a face in a crowd an instant before knowing you'd been looking for it your entire life.
His foot stopped mid-step. His palm found the wall -- old plaster, cold, four centuries of incense smoke pressed into the stone with nowhere else to go.
His face, in the thin morning light: grain-coloured hair, the amber tree, of the golden harvest.
The serenity it wore was structural now, the choice made so long ago it had calcified into the bone.
Something moved through it that had no performance in it at all. The sourceless warmth around him -- the kind that returned null on every instrument, no business existing in a Vatican corridor before six in the morning -- shuddered.
Contracted.
Then spread. Outward, slow, filling the corridor with a quality the window had never managed.
He knows his name.
The incense in the plaster, The dawn glow.
His palm against the cold wall and the warmth spreading anyway, the way it always spread, the way love spread when it starts to grow on you.
· · ·
POV: Lucifer
The glass had been empty for two hours, fifty-three minutes and he had not yet put it down.
A choice. Everything about this flat was a choice -- the old wood smell of it, expensive stone... cool since before looking cool had a market rate, the amber of the lamps placed at the exact angle that made the room look like a painting of itself rather than a room.
The drink in his hand: the glass was the point, scotch incidental, the image of man at window with drink communicating a specific curated melancholy he had refined over the better part of a century and deployed with the dedication of a craftsman.
There are worse ways to spend eternity, and he could rank the alternatives in descending order of creative failure, which occasionally he did, at parties, particularly just to amuse himself.
He had been, as a matter of fact, enjoying his evening.
Then the name arrived and the glass nearly went flying.
Nearly.
His grip tightened -- knuckles white, briefly, a barely-audible click of crystal under pressure -- and then everything in him went very still with the practiced totality of someone who had been performing stillness for long enough that it had become second nature.
Black hair immaculate, placed rather than styled, the way a thing settled when it had accepted where it lived. Dark eyes that gathered light like an abyss, too much pooling at the iris -- a beautiful wrongness, the face of something that had decided beauty was the most effective available armour and had been proved correct for longer than mortals wore armors.
The theatre of himself held. Every arranged element staying meticulous.
Something behind it received three syllables in the oldest register and went very quiet.
Vothanael...
He said it under his breath to feel the shape of it, the syllables familiar in the way of things known before knowing had a name for itself.
He set the glass on the sill. Placed it precisely, that same muscle memory as the hair, the suit and every arrangement in the flat, the instinct that made the most bearable version of any surface before it could be anything else.
Outside: London, magnificent in its ignorance. Petrol and October rain, a bus, pigeons on the railing holding their grey council.
A woman on the pavement below with a small dog working through a formal grievance against a lamppost. The city two floors beneath the oldest name spoken in the oldest tongue in a register the building above it had been built to discuss and could not actually contain.
The dog won the legal battle by the way.
He felt, briefly, a fondness for it that arrived sincerely, which was irritating...
He had been dismantling sincerity for a long time and it kept reassembling when he wasn't watching -- and under the fondness something older, less convenient, that lived beneath grief. The thing that had been there first. Before he had decided.
He had always known the name would be spoken eventually.
He had not yet decided how he felt about the fact that hearing it felt, against every intention, like something being returned.
. . .
POV: Bael of the 72 Demons of Ars Goetia
Petition sixty-three.
The eastern reach. A boundary dispute two centuries running.
The hall at fourth bell: dark, cold, the particular cold of stone that had been absorbing English winters for three hundred years and was efficient at it now.
The smell of the documents: mineral, dry, old paper that had forgotten it was ever new.
Bael read at the long table with the total unhurried attention of a man who understood that every document in his hand was a consequence.
Consequences had causes, and causes had decisions somewhere in the past that mattered more than what the documents say it was about.
He always found the decision. He had been finding it since before the eastern reach was a hellscape of wars and pandemonium.
White hair in the thin window light -- marble-white, the white of cold absorbed into colour over an impossible span, nothing so impermanent as age.
Grey eyes in a face that had learned to tell nothing unless explicitly allowed.
Three silver rings on his right hand, each one a fractionally different shade - the first old, the second older, the third so old it had ceased being an object and become something closer to a standing agreement between the metal and the air that contained it.
He had watched warmth tried as an administrative philosophy. The results were....More useful and fruit bearing than he ever thought.
Second page. The name arrived.
The hall's silence changed. It had been quiet -- this was different, the quality of stone that has received something larger than it was built to hold, going very still in the wake of it.
Bael set the petition down. Squared its edge to the table's corner. Unconscious. The habit of a man for whom imprecision in small things was an early indicator of imprecision in large ones.
The grey eyes lifted.
Vothanael...
The arithmetic ran immediately, because it was hard wired after the aeons of war in this godforsaken plane. Heh Ironic... -- sixty-six legions trained it into him across more time than legions had a name for.
The thing that ended the Primordial. He had been born into the silence after that ending the way everything of sufficient age had been born into it.
The silence was the world's original floor. He had understood it his entire existence as the fact of something ever since the first clash between Heaven's forces and their's.
A consequence. A condition. The first and most absolute.
It had a name now.
The consequences of that thought arranged themselves in his mind in order of bone crunching gravity.
He gave them the room they needed. He was a patient man. He had learned patience the way marble learned cold -- not as virtue but as the natural result of being a certain kind of thing for long enough.
The three rings lay still on the wood. Sixty-two more petitions on the table. If they could only sign themselves now..wouldn't that have been Exalting?
To be continued....
(Author's Notes: Hello dearest Readers! I am very proud and happy to announce that my novel has been approved for being Contracted as of today!!! All your support so far has been a tremendous help for me to attain this)
(In celebration of this, I'm going to choose 2 readers who review my novel to be in a cameo with their name for an NPC in the coming plot!)
(Please keep supporting me as you all are. It means a lot to me . Though I certainly wouldn't mind a few powerstones from y'all hehe...)