Pandemonium

Lucifer couldn’t remember much. Michael’s sword, cutting his heart out of his chest, then that very heart squeezed like a bloody ruby after extraction, a face being crushed into the dirt, his light faltering with every wounded pulse of the aorta. Michael, he was crying emeralds, his flaming hair curling into furious tendrils, the heat of his burning sandal scalding Lucifer’s bruised, broken, teeth kicked in face.

He remembered his feet crippled, then the legs’ flesh sewing themselves together, and finally, a white serpent’s tail taking the place of his legs with vicious razor scales. He was more dazed than anything else, when the curse of the Protoevangelion took hold. Then, Michael taking his volcanic sword, kicking Lucifer’s limp body over, and hacksawing his peacock wings in one clean yet serrated swipe that hurt like his guts being chewed on. He finally screamed then, and his halo sputtered out, and Michael, he leaned down beside Lucifer’s broken body, plunged his sword in the dirt as a cross, and knelt in prayer, sobbing himself.

“Father, am I my brother’s keeper?” Michael bawled, peridot eyes wet as rain in Eden.

Their Father was silent, the light of the Throne in Briah simply shining on.

“So it is done, then,” Michael muttered through wracked sobs, and Lucifer tried to measure some last words, something wretched and terrible, to haunt Michael into eternity, but his wit, that fabled wit, it was fleeting, so he simply said:

“So this is how you keep your brother: cold, dead, cursed, and broken. You do not need Father to answer your prayers, sullen Archstratigos. I hope every night, when you sleep, you see all the dead bloodied by your hands. My last bit of venom: you will rue this day, it will drive you mad, and you will be far more broken than me forevermore.”

Michael cried. “Then that is the Cross I shall bear into eternity. I am the wheat, and you are the chaff.” Michael looked at the heart in his hand with remorse, stood, then kicked Lucifer off the edge of Briah, into the Pit that was carved out when Samael fell from his Kingdom, the Fifth Heaven, and had been bleeding Paradise into the Deep ever since.

Lucifer did not think, could barely feel, a comet falling, just radiation. Nuclear blast agony. Hacked off wings, lost legs, heartless monster, cursed as the beast in the field. He did not cry out, but somehow, with some strange arcane glory, his heat left him, and he became a pulsing, freezing neutron star, with crushing gravity, and as he fell, he saw the conquering angels cast out a third of Heaven, and from the firmament fell the stars of the Dragon. 

When Lucifer crashed, his flesh had incinerated, he was simply bone and snakeskin, a Qlipha husk. He coiled in on himself, wretched bones, in this place that would be his home forevermore.

He raked his phalanges through the soil: red clay, like the earth was bleeding. Fertile, but acidic. The Red Styx sloughed on the clotted shores of bone that lay above the potter’s field. His brethren, his banner men, were still falling.

“So you too have become dry bone, I don’t have the tail though, that is a nice touch. I would say it is nice to see you, but I’ve been blinded ever since that little incidence in the Garden with, what was her name, Eve? Adam’s whore or whatever. Tell me brother, whysoever did you crashland my home?”

Lucifer groaned, in the way bones grind their teeth, a skeleton of snake and man, and turned to see with his eye hollows his least desired visitor. “Fucking Samael. Of course that would be my greeting,” he sighed, sizing up the Grim Reaper who sat eating a pomegranate, spitting out the seeds in Lucifer’s general direction. “So this is my punishment, an eternity with you?”

“Oh, me? No brother, our little joint is about to get much more crowded. Lilith and I have our Legions, tell me, our alliance never panned out, did it? I snuck into the Garden, as you remember – that was part of our two-man con, but that old codger our Father saw me right away, so into Gehenna it was with me. I do miss my Kingdom, Briah – please tell me you didn’t screw the place over with your little rebellion. Lucifer, who so desired to usurp God, and little old me, who simply wanted a good fuck. Eve was a lousy fuck, let me tell you that. Dumb ditzy blonde. All submissive and shit. No wonder Adam strays to Lilith.”

“The last thing I want to hear right now are your lukewarm exploits in the sack with Adam’s whore, and your lackluster performance,” Lucifer dragged himself over to the Styx and drank from its bloodied waters, figuring if he was cursed, he may as well drink poison. Wedding himself to what would become Hell and sucking at Tartarus’ teat, his strength was restored, and his flesh was restored, golden human above the waist, albino serpent tail below, and his back itched like Hell. He groaned, and white peacock feathers bleached as bone sprouted from his back, useless, hideous, dry and razored.

“Oh, I wouldn’t call it lackluster, I do believe I shattered Eve’s world. Like a mewling kitten, Adam seems to have your skills in bed, which is to say, can’t please a blowup doll.” Samael chomped on an apple now, something he had drawn from his severe black Grim Reaper robe, and he shifted back into his human guise, rain owl wings draped over his pale flesh, ruby eyes, and curling black hair.

“I’m sure Lilith’s complaints about what a lousy fuck you are ring hollow, oh illustrious seducer. Really, what tiny prick brands himself Accuser, Seducer, and Destroyer,” Lucifer rose finally, touching the wound and rot on his breast. It was pus filled and black with necrosis, like a spider bite. “Bow, Samael. Know your place. You were always more worm than wyrm.”

“Those are fighting words, say, doesn’t Bright and Morning Star sound a bit fruity. Not that you and Beelzebub don’t, shall we say, define fruitbats.” Samael lobbed the apple core at Lucifer. Lucifer caught it and crushed it with his talons. He apparently had talons now.

“Bow.”

“Oh, and suck your cock while I’m at it, why don’t I, then I can swallow too, instead of spitting it out like a good little girl. Or would you prefer to fuck me in the ass? Can you sense the homoerotic tension bubbling betwixt us, dearest Luci! Discipline me! Tell me what a dirty, lousy fuck I am! I’m getting hard under these stuffy, dusty reaping robes, I promise!”

“You are not fit to be King, and you are not fit to serve me in my kingdom. So where do you fit in this story, Samael? Can’t fight worth a damn and can’t fuck worth a damn, can’t please Eve or Lilith, blows his one and only mission by going overkill and seducing – badly, I might add – Heaven’s trophy wife. Tell me, was it really worth it to fall for touching the off-limit humans?”

“Eh, maybe, who knows, I was curious, she was curious, I warned her, and oh, I bowed for her. Don’t think Adam knows how to use his tongue worth a damn. Carnal pleasure, hmm, that lovely melody. Corrupting her was what I was really interested in, and seeing what would come of my seed in her belly. Father has a Son, why shouldn’t I get a chance at meddling in human affairs through my scion.”

“So you raped her.”

“But of course!”

Lucifer spat on the ground, and when he did, black venom came from his hollow fangs. The bones on the potter’s field burned with his acid. “Bow, you lowly worm. Or I will make you.”

Samael grimaced. “Wasn’t not bowing the whole reason you fell?”

“I put none above Father. To do so would be pride.”

“Yet you fell for Pride.”

“It’s a slip of the tongue, you disgusting scrap of eunuch.”

“My pecker is quite sizable, so, are you sucking my cock now?”

Lucifer was quick, fast as his fabled lightning, and he used his tail to strangle Samael, then force him to the ground, taking his talons and plunging them into Samael’s blind owls. Samael cried like his wife Agrat bat Mahalath did in the desert under Lilith’s Wing.

Lucifer smirked. “That’s better, I suppose being the Protoevangelion has its uses, scales aside.” He used the last bit of his razored tail to slit Samael’s throat.

Samael bled oil, and the grimy rainbows smelled like gasoline. He sputtered blood pumping out his gaping wound, and Lucifer dug his thumbs deeper into Samael’s eye sockets. He shook, frothing at the mouth with bloody foam.

And, Lucifer laughed. The first scrap of happiness since this whole bloody cataclysm of want, pride, war, and death had yielded to him.

“That’s better. Perhaps I’ll make screams a feature in this newfound kingdom… screams, and pain, are starting to sound like hosannas to me.”

Samael bellowed, then wheezed, then he hung limp, shifting into a pile of bones, clattering to the ground to join the other carcasses in the potter’s field and bloodsoil, his disgusting cloak carpeting the clacking.

Lucifer slid on with the grace of a serpent, took wing, and began

to build.