Prologue- The End of the Beginning
Abdiel looked across the body of water stretching before him. Its surface was afire. The scene it created through hot flame, and the stench of the last war humanity would ever know, made the former archangel of God tear and cry pitifully at the waste. The people of the planet had brought upon themselves a destruction never to again be rivaled in all of time. The end was present in front of him. After a moment he began to sob uncontrollably.
He hated his human emotion. Over a thousand lifetimes had led to naught, save teaching him that this world his master had created, was a fruitless project. He had fought endlessly throughout the millennia. He had killed thousands on every battlefront known to humanity: Jungle, Desert, Mountain, River, Earth, Space, Foreign, Domestic, Alien, and Holy. On all of which he had eventually fallen. All the past lives he had led had ended in death. All of them had been painful, proud deaths in wars that he did not fight in to win, but to die.
As he sat and watched the last scraps of humanity fall to their own insidious weaponry, he removed his rifle from his shoulder, his pistol from his holster, and threw them off the steep cliff into the water, suddenly deciding that he would no longer be needing them, this close to the end.
Staring at the countless fallen men laying on the ground around him, the lives he had ended this day, he recalled the lives he had led all in detail. The names by which he had been known, the ranks and titles he had earned: Grunt, Sheik, Archer, Infantry, Carthaginian, Caesar, Knight, Guard, Neanderthal, Chief, General, King, Slave, Infidel, Crusader, Father.
As he recalled these all, he knew that they all were a soldier, save one. He was a soldier. His punishment from the Almighty was to fight endlessly for all of human time, to live the lives of mortals, and die on the field of battle, wherever it lay. He had performed his task. This life was his last, mankind would soon be a memory no one would live to remember. Throughout it all he had rarely lived long enough to earn the name father, even though he had loved all his children.
His crime was the worst of his shame. He was the first to fall at the hands of Lucifer, during his fruitless bid for the throne of heaven. After a thousand years of endless battle, battle fought in the name of god, he was shamed by being pierced by the blade of the desolate one, and punished for asking to be spared when his brethren had not yet had to. In this warrior, god saw the first seed of humanity. The want to live, was in him. He became the first thread of a woven tapestry that became humanity and the earth as we know it.
The soldier sat and pondered these things. He had decided many years ago, that what had occurred to him was not a punishment in itself. He had reaped many of the benefits that a good soldier receives.
Throughout time he had been rich, respected, powerful, famous, infamous, and had bedded the most beautiful women on earth across the expanse of time. He had loved, and been loved. The world ran thick with the children he had created, with and without love. With that thought he realized that many people of the modern age must surely have his blood in their veins. He scoffed at the thought. They were all dead of their own means. They had chosen to destroy themselves, for they had run out of true enemy's decades ago.
Most of all he wondered when the true end would come. When would the warheads streaking across the sky fall and consume him as they had much of the rest of humanity. The sun is long blotted out, from the dying of this Earth, barely visible even as we continue our trek throughout the system.
Just as quickly as he had finished his thought on this subject, a series of bright lights flash across the water, and then all around him, scant miles away. The end of his punishment is near, he knows and he lies back, lighting a cigarette, and crossing his arms behind his head, preparing to suffer death the last time, before he goes where we will go after leaving this world. Unable to determine whether he will go to Heaven or Hell, he simply hope's God is merciful.
As the light gathered around him he gets to his feet, dropping his cigarette and crushing it under his boot. Feeling Death's breathing on his neck, Abdiel sees his lives pass before his eyes, just as his mortal form turns to ash and blows away in the wind...