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Chapter 1: Landing
Incoming, screamed Phosphorus’ instincts.
Angels kept their friends-foe identification on full blast at all times; a direct link between them and the Eternal, and everything around them. Love me, …
…worship me
…obey me
…fear me.
Demons learned to be less obvious, and Phosphorus was even more cautious than most of his banished brethren. He slipped into the shadows, fighting his very being as a LightBringer, subduing his natural instinctive welcome to the whatever sibling was landing, wondering what had brought one of the favorite children to Earth.
His present mission wasn’t that important, a simple temptation, sowing a seed of rebellion against authority. A question of should the way things always have been, be the way they should continue? All the teen needed to do was read a simple pamphlet. One clearly not Good, with black and red ink pictures. The tri-fold was out on the table for summer programs, just a stray slip of paper someone had dropped there. Patience and free-will, Phosphorus used both like the twin blades he carried to cut into people’s psyche. He loved going for the jugular, even mentally. Properly nurtured, the uncertainty would settle in the teen, filling them with life-long anxiety, a distrust of governments and corporations. He had hundreds of seeds planted throughout humanity wanting for the right time to sprout them, bursting the weeds through the concrete of civilization.
But angels never noticed the start. Their high-flying vision only saw the big picture, few ever saw individuals from the distant skies. Fewer still landed on Earth and got their feet dirty.
Smoke, fog, cloud poured from the heavens, sucked into the vortex of the favored. The creature landed swathed in haze. They did love their entrances.
Under the bright June sun, the heavenly moisture cleared. Black wings curled around the angel, tips trimmed in red, bright as new roses or freshly spilt blood.
One of Uriel’s soldiers then. More tolerable than most. Gatherers of the dead, they actually did touch humans, if only to gather the souls destined for above.
That meant one of the children at the high school fair would be passing. He hoped it wasn’t his project. Maybe it would be one of the teachers or parents.
All the mortals unconsciously dodged around the collector, leaving a wide space for the celestial as the creature stood tall. And tall they were, over a foot taller than Phosphorus. Not so rare, as he was on the shorter side of ageless beings, but Uriel went for a more uniform look when creating their army. Few stood as tall as that.
Could it be?
The four wings, each over ten feet, condensed, bringing the long white locks into view, tangled from flying into a vibrant mess. Then their sharp features emerged from behind the deadly feathers – high cheekbones and a broad nose stretching dark skin, highlighting a bright teethy smile and molten silver-black eyes, everything pinched into a pointed chin.
Phosphorus turned off his breathing to prevent himself from sucking in a deep breath.
Tamesis.
DarkRiver.
They were looking around.
Searching for the target of their mission.
He hoped.
Because the other option was too painful to consider.
He was tired of false hopes.
Chapter 2: Holding
Where? Tamesis blinked their eyes clear of the mist and clouds which stubbornly clung to them like firmament unwilling to leave the living with only a single step upon its surface. Mud clinging to a shoe, mist sighing on the wing.
The demon was here. Hiding. “Come out, come out where ever you are.”
Around them, mortals winced and shied as their voice bounced and boomed somewhere between unforgiveable feedback and heart-hurt harmony.
Oops.
The mist had clung to them for a good reason. A sigh and shimmer, and they took a kinder form for the humans. The mists, like the clouds above, teasing the human eyes with shapes they find comfortable to look at. Around them, the crowds moved closer, though still unconsciously giving them enough room to take to the skies if needed.
“Come on, we don’t have all day!” Tamesis shouted in the local tongue, voice tamed to human frequencies. Normally demons burst out ready to rumble if they see an angel land. Time was a-ticking. They weren’t sure how long their mini-holiday will be allowed.
Nothing.
How like Phosphorus.
Well, death always finds its target.
Tamesis narrowed their eyes, guiding the wind to carry sound, reaching out their being to the else-now where souls and spirts mirrored the physical. Come on, LightBringer, you can’t hide from me. Don’t you dare.
A shadow rippled with an inner shine. The scent of sulphur and carbon confirmed demon.
There you are, you little traitor.
Tamesis leapt towards the area, a darkened corner where school gym connected to the science building, they spread their wings to prevent Phosphorous from darting away, before wrapping them both completely within the plumage, feathers flat, raised just enough to cushion, not cut.
“Gotcha.” Tamesis rubbed the shorter celestial’s black curls with their jawbone while hugging the demon tight.
Phosphorous struggled but didn’t make a sound.
Tamesis lifted the other, slipping the red tips of their wings below the other’s smoke-shaped feet. Without leverage, arms tightly pressed against the body by the hug, Phosphorous’ struggles slowed.
Eventually, a sag followed by legs wrapping around Tamesis’ middle occurred. The demon’s head fell against their shoulder bone like they had not slept sounding for an eternity and finally found the cool side of their favorite pillow. The smaller being inhaled a shuddering breath, and exhaled a “no” so softly inaudible only an angel’s ear could hear it.
They didn’t ease the hug until the demon trembling slowed. “I tried,” they said. “I tried so hard.”
“I know. I know.” Tamesis whispered back. “I remember those years too.”
“How much?” Phosphorous asked against their neckbone. “How much of us?”
“Only four turns around the sun.” A sad chuckle slipped over their teeth. “COVID kept me busy. So many pickups needing mercy. Then the wars, genocides, Rohingya, Ukraine, Yazidi, Darfur, Palestine.” Tamesis eased their hug, slipping their arms around within the mist until Phosphorous’ limbs were free. “We took a long time to find each other.”
Chapter 3: Stand-off
A very long time. Phosphorous mentally agreed. Maybe too long.
He eased the knife up from his wrist sheathe. Maybe not the best plan, held within an angel’s wings, especially one of Uriel’s lot, but it wasn’t as if he would be able to close within Tamesis’ wingspan normally.
“And now you have once again. How lucky.” The demon pressed closer with his freed arms and legs, as close as he could manage between the heavenly mist and hellish smoke separating them, hiding their appearance from the humans, imprinting the angels ribcage into his skin before he pressed the hell-crafted blade against Tamesis throat. “Now, put me down and step away.”
“Ah, Fossy, don’t be like that.”
“One.”
The angel sighed in a weird harmonic strum between bells and harps, but eased the demon onto the ground and stepped back, pulling their wings completely into the mist. “I didn’t think we would come back.”
“You shouldn’t remember that, not yet.” Phosphorous rotated his wrist, keeping the blade between them. The same dagger which had pierced Tamesis celestial form an eternity ago. He had been able to use the short blade because the angel had dug every primary feather tip from all four wings into his body, allowing him to get close enough to kill the angel even as they spread their wings wide, flinging his substance to the six corners of heaven. “Not ever. Your kind doesn’t eat the fruit.”
“Okay, I’m guessing here.” Tamesis lifted an arm to scratch their backbone. “But, I mean, if I felt like I do now and was told to take on Morning Star’s army, I would make a dive for you because I don’t want to hate anyone for killing you and I wouldn’t want to live without you. So, you know–”
“Hey ma’am, you okay?” A man asked approaching them. With the wings retracted and the mist no longer obscuring them from the humans, the scene of a man holding a knife out at a person in a white thobe became visible to the fair’s crowds.
Phosphorous dropped the dagger back within the sheathe. Tamesis looked over their shoulder, their messy dreads softening their sharp bony features. “I’m fine, thank you for asking.”
“Oh, sorry sir.” The guy stepped back into the crowd, bumping a teen toward the summer program table.
The demon narrowed his black eyes, a slight smile touching his lips as the youth picked up a brightly colored pamphlet, before turning back to present situation with undivided attention. “You killed me because you couldn’t live without me?”
“Well, no, you always flipped me when you were teaching us Uriel’s how to fight dirty. At least as much as I remember. I bet I figured you would kill me too. At least, I think I would have figured things like that and would go for it. Together in life and death.”
“And you felt this way after only remembering our first four years?” Phosphorous lip curled. “Just our first four years and then the last five thousand years of ‘following orders’.”
“Of course, wouldn’t you, Fossy?”
He would. He did. Still.
And it wasn’t, couldn’t be enough.
“We need to talk.”
“Just talk?” A grin peeled back beneath the mist in a way humans should never see.
One that had no business moving part of him, making him want things, with him in fallen form and Tamesis one hundred percent still an angel.
Phosphorous snapped his fingers.
Chapter 4: Talking
Ask a person before taking them back to your place, Tamesis thought, even as they let Phosphorous take them wherever they intended. Well, I guess I gave them permission by letting it happen.
The small house had hardwood floors and unadorned plaster walls. The few pieces of furniture had no cushioning and the utilitarian chairs had backrests raising a bare six inches above the seat, perfect for winged creatures. Nothing crashed as Tamesis spread their wings and brushed the walls. The exception to the no-comfort rule, was a window nook with a narrow bookshelf built in either side. Dozens of crystals hung on the frosted window sending rainbows around the room. Tamesis smiled to see Phosphorus still loved to read.
God is love. But They are also the Word. Most angel worship circled around song, music, and poetry. Fossy chose to worship in the quiet, in Word made flesh, made physical into language. When they had taken Tamesis home after a particularly stressful training session for fighting the stuff Between, the scrolls floating around their private space had fascinated the Uriel-created being. None of their host-siblings sought the Word aspect of the Infinite. They sung and carried the fallen Home from battle. Everything was done surrounded by others, shared by others, decided by others. To choose to study the Word in private amazed them. That is when they fell in love with Lucifer’s solider completely.
“Water?” Phosphorous asked walking toward a wall opening with tile visible on the floor beyond. Several items in that room hummed.
“Not human.” Tamesis responded loudly, before walking over to the reading seat to see what books their soul mate kept as a fallen. “Or demon for that matter,” they muttered much more quietly, not certain how well the other’s hearing still worked. The fact water could be drunk by the fallen was interesting. Many of the humans they had picked up asked for one last bite of food, one last drink of water, before being transported to heaven. It made one wonder about the gift of consumption given to those with flesh. Perhaps being fallen wasn’t completely a punishment.
Animal Farm, The Essential Martin Luther King Jr, Mindfulness, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, Hunger Games. What a weird assortment of books.
Picking out The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Tamesis laid upside down on the cushioned seat, placing their legs against the glass and hanging their head down toward the floor and started flipping through the pages as they heard cabinets open and liquid getting poured in the other room. They listened with half an ear, and glanced through the book with half an eye, and smelled the sulfur and carbon with half a nose, and tasted the water in the air with half a tongue.
They heard the demon they cross half a planet to find reenter the room and knew when they froze seeing Tamesis long neck stretched out before them.
“Um, you might not want to read that.” Phosphorous’ voice roughened into a growl.
Tamesis looked over. They often hung opposite directions once they became soulmates. Fossy didn’t want them to get used to up and down, as many of those living in heaven had once Earth had been created, as the Between didn’t exist with direction and those that existed Between didn’t limit their thought that way. The added attraction was Lucifer’s child loved the neck and the jugular especially, anything that stretched it pulled them in, and when they floated every which way, necks get stretched a lot.
“Now why would you say that?” They tilted their head to the side, stretching their neck further, their eyes alighting on one underlined part of the text. Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence. “Oh.” They brought the book edges closed with a slap.
“Yeah, none of my books are something that an angel should read.” Phosphorous sipped their glass of water. “Not if you want to stay an angel.”
Placing the blue book on the window cushion, Tamesis asked, “What if I would like a demon to become an angel?”
“Not going to happen.”
“Oh?”
Chapter 5: Temptation
Tamesis stood. But not in the way of humans. If Phosphorus wasn’t used to the horrors that were the fallen, even his brain would have skittered away into madness. Unlike heaven, where gravity had no up and down except the natural tendency to orient to Earth as below, Earth very much controlled orientation and the fallen and humans obeyed its requirements. But Tamesis was no fallen.
Their being connected to the Divine and their true form wasn’t limited to the physical.
They moved their skeleton within their skin. Bones disconnected and slid down, the face slid upward, twisted dreadlocks bouncing as they move from floor to where the feet used to rest against the glass. Arms slithered in the sack of flesh from below the cushion to about three feet above it, equal to the second shelf of books. With feet firmly on the floor and head at the top of the body, Tamesis stood.
Why the fuck was that sexy?
Power.
Jealousy.
Except that power was mine. Is mine.
If I can take it.
If Tamesis lets me take it.
Phosphorus licked his lips and finished his water in one chug.
He watched them slide across the floor dropping mist in foggy clumps, the dreadlocks shortening with each cloud giving way to gravity.
Remember they don’t do sexy.
The white thobe faded like a desert mirage leaving an androgynous thin body behind.
Remember they are an angel.
The dark skin split next, peeling away from the mobile bones of a Uriel’s spawn true form. Only the glowing silver-black pits of the skull’s eye remaining of the illusion presented to humans.
Remember they killed me.
And their wings. Those black wings tipped in red blood after their first battle Between. They’re first battle against Phosphorous and Satan’s hordes. Their ongoing war of heaven against the hell it created.
Tamesis ran a finger along Phosphorus’ throat as he swallowed.
“Are you sure I can tempt you to change sides?” they asked, the cold bone touching sliding down the beating pulse of his very real physical form.
His boner reminding him how very physical this form was and how very not-physical the angel before him was. He closed his eyes to keep from falling into the dark pits he loved so well. “Positive.”
A bony hand gripped the right side of his neck, passing through the skin without breaking it, entering his essence. A thousand time, a million times, a billion memories flooded him and no memories at all. The fire of LightBringer and the water of DarkRiver merged-pushed-blended-separated-mixed-…and the souls parted when Tamesis pulled their hand out.
He wanted to beg them to take his soul. Just take it. He would give it willingly.
But Tamesis couldn’t.
That would kill him. The edges of his spirt falling away like the mist did when Tamesis took their true form. Then he would reform in hell and have to climb his way back out.
But that didn’t mean they couldn’t make a proper merge right now.
There would be hell to pay, and likely heaven too. It broke all the rules, but he never was much of ones for rules.
Phosphorous blew back the hell-smoke shading his true form. Black hair gleamed bright. Perfect skin, muscles, movement. Balanced in an aesthetic which would drive a human mad with its beauty. Behind him white wings rose. Not the sharp scale feathers of the Uriel-kin, but the Morning-Star soft feathers shimmering with rainbows. He wrapped his broad hands around his soulmates neck and pulled their grinning skull to his face, pulling what little divine essence he had left to ease his physicality barrier.
Tamesis did the rest.
Chapter 6: Merging
One-them-us
water-fire-air-earth-essence-material
all-none
them-he-together
obedient-love
bright-shadow-life-death
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Obedient
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OBEY
Chapter 7: Choice
Hands pulled Phosphorus and Tamesis apart. Angels in the armor of Michael surrounded them. Phosphorous counted five he could see, plus the one holding him. The loud “we are all angels here” confirmed the number. He breathed in to scent if any had learned to be more cautious, cat-like cherubim, burning wood, feathers, bone took some sorting out, but the number seem true.
“Dafa, do you mind?” Tamesis asked, pulling against one of the General’s own, yanking their skeleton wrist free. None can hold Death against their will.
“Actually, we do.” The ranking angel drew back their lips from their five mouths. “Consorting with demons is treason. Punishable by death.”
“And what good will that do?” Tamesis shot back, “I’ll be back when I re-form.”
“Correction,” Idris said from where they rested their hand on their sword, “you will be back when you remember this fallen, and that won’t be for a long, long time. You can only remember what you have lived to match.”
Idris had been created from Raziel’s essence, and stood separate from the platoon of Michael’s angels. Phosphorous wondered briefly why they were among the squad. A mystery from the mystery angels. Best remove that one first, unknowns were bad.
“And now that we know exactly how long it is,” Dafa’s multiple eyes shifted in a menacing manner, “you will never survive until then again. Two thousand years and you will wake new each time, a blank slate for heaven.”
“No!” Tamesis curled their fingers into talons, “Love wins. It has to. Phosphorous remembers. You can’t kill him and have him forget.”
Dafa and the other angels laughed. “That is part of their punishment for eating the Fruit of Knowledge! They never forget the war, rising their hand against friends and loved one. Forever separated from heaven and all the joy and comfort there. Everything is imprinted in their memory forever.”
“His, his memory. Phosphorous is a he.”
“Ah, yes.”
Dafa sneer would have been more effective if Phosphorus had enough eyes to watch all the mouths, but he was concentrating on placing everyone in the room and didn’t have time to watch even one. Michael’s crew may be the army, used to working together, but Lucifer’s group snuck behind lines, as much as lines existed in the Between and got things done one-on-one, much like Uriel’s group doing retrievals and battlefield cleanup often needed to respond without backup. One of the reasons why he had been training the recently formed all those years ago and met Tamesis.
“The corruption of the flesh limits the fallen.”
“It’s not corruption.”
And it’s not a limitation. Phosphorous thought as he spun, dagger dropping from his wrist sheathe into his hand to cut the angel holding him. The being had to take physical form to hold him, a slice across the next sent heavenly essence spurting into the room.
The demon pulled it into the void where his essence used to be, and crossed into the spirit side, rolling forward, he pulled a second black blade from his boot and shoved it between Dafa’s second and third mouth, into a red eye.
Above him, Tamesis wings unfurled, edges tilted just so into razors as only scaled feathers can be. The red tips redyed in angel blood. As his soulmate had removed the platoon leader from the equation, Phosphorous moved quickly below the four wings of Death’s Own toward the Mystery angel, one knife flying ahead.
And still too slow as their sword removed one of Tamesis’ wings and buried deep into the ribcage. Idris withdrew it with a hand motion pulling Tamesis essence through the hole they had created.
With only one knife available, Orpheus, one of the three still active, slowed Phosphorous further but didn’t stop him though the angel kept hold of the dagger that skewered them. Sirius downed by Tamesis wings like Dafa in a maneuver the two of them had created in private early in their relationship. If he didn’t know his soulmate had their memory caught up to their relationship, that little weaponization of feathers would have proved it.
Two left.
“We did our duty, no need to reset. Go.” Idris said to the only remaining living angel. Michael angel’s are exceptional at following orders and they went. Pulling the ineffective dagger out of their armor, the last angel standing tossed it lazily toward Phosphorous. It landed weirdly in his hand, but he didn’t take his eyes off his last enemy. They said, “You’re welcome.” before disappearing.
The only instinctive “friend” in the room still alive was leaking essence, and Phosphorous dived toward his angel, placing his all-too-physical hand over the metaphysical wound. “Tamesis.”
“Fossy.” Their skull rolled so their eye sockets focused on him. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” He whispered, reaching his other hand toward their cheekbone, only to discover that somehow Idris hadn’t actually tossed him back a weapon, but an elongated fruit. One he knew only too well. He stared at it in confusion.
Why? How?
“Don’t forget me.”
Distracted, turning the red rind fruit over in his hands, the LightBringer said, “I won’t. I couldn’t.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I could remember you forever too.”
Is it right? Do I have the right?
“What if you could?”
Tamesis laughed. “They will kill me again and again in heaven. Never giving me another chance to remember you. Remember us.”
“Unless you take a bite of the forbidden fruit.”
“Do you have the ability to enter Eden, because I can’t get us there.” Their eyes grew dimmer as the silver leaked out.
“No, but somehow, it came to us.” Phosphorous showed Tamesis the fruit Idris had given him. “I would not give up hell to be with you in heaven. I would understand if you would not give up heaven to join me in hell.”
Bones clattered as they shifted faster than the demon could follow. The fruit was yanked out of his hands and shoved between Tamesis teeth. “See you in hell.” They took a big bite.
The last of their energy went to processing it before they faded.
(words 3,966; first published 5/27/2024)