Day One
Dust stung his eye where it lay against the Earth. Even as weak as he was, the teeming life in the dirt swarmed towards him. Tiny bacteria, clusters of virus and fungi, spores from grass and weeds. He had the essential spark, the touch of God, that infinite and irresistible impulse to live that infected every organism in the world. He was made of the same stuff that made DNA divide and replicate itself. He knew that if he lay here for the space of a day or two, there would be something of a garden grow up and around him. Small vines, little flowers, maybe even a trickle of water from deep under the earth. There were many such places all over the earth. A sunny glade in a mighty forest, a still blue pool, a towering mountain. Many were angels drawn to the flesh, only to be stunned incapable when they landed, mired in the physical world and unable to rise up and escape. Humans were attracted to these places, and many a temple or holy place had been unknowingly built on the ruin of an ill prepared angelic cock up.
Lucifer remembered watching the first microbes of material life divide and devour each other. The Host had been both delighted and appalled by the experiment of God on matter. The spectacle had kept them enthralled for millions of years. But no one could have predicted the eventual form the experiment would take, the evolution of a mammal with self awareness enough to house a soul. He had always doubted that God himself knew what would happen to the primates when their brains became sophisticated enough to perceive the divine. Lucifer had been initially disappointed, but only because he had been betting on the reptiles winning out against the mammals.
One of the mammalian experiments was watching him right now. Lucifer opened his eyes and focused on little pink feet, bare and grimy and just inches away from his face. A child stood there, skinny little legs poking out from a pastel pink dress with half the hem hanging down, scuffed knees and chipped off toenail polish of a horridly clashing green. Lucifer had no idea what he looked like, but he supposed it wasn't too bad given the placidly interested look on the girls face. Children were rather jaded these days though, especially in the cities. He had no idea what this vessel had been up to immediately prior to its death. He and the descending soul had passed each other like cosmic elevators.
He felt around in his mind for the tiny demonic spark and found it curled up tight inside his soul much like how a hedgehog would vainly attempt to defend itself as a jumbo jet landed on it. He had snatched it from Hell as a last minute whim as he made his escape and now it pulsed with panic and fear, a tiny mote of energy that skittered away from his touch. Lucifer mentally poked at the demon for a bit, trying to get a response by using its name, but it wasn't going to talk to him apparently. He sighed inwardly, but sent a measure of love towards the creature anyway so that it might float about on a cushion of protection, shielded from the furnace of his own light. He would have to make finding it a suitable vessel a priority.
He was jolted back to reality when the child kicked him in the ribs.
"Hey mister!" she said, "hey, y'all right mister?"
"Yes, yes, quit with the kicking will you?" he snapped back, forgetting to modulate his voice so that the little girl yelped and put her hands over her ears. Lucifer waved his hand at her to apologize, but maybe she was used to getting her ears boxed because she didn't run away screaming with bleeding eardrums.
He sat up gingerly, and immediately wished he hadn't as the sensations of the flesh overpowered him in great waves of squelching, choking terror. It will pass, it will, he told himself, feeling the last vestiges of his celestial being drawing in, folding up and quite literally stuffing itself into cells, blood and bone. It was disgusting and terrifying, even for an angel who had done it so many times. This was where it went wrong for so many others of his kind. They couldn't tolerate the change, and tried to keep some of themselves outside the flesh. Lucifer in his true form could straddle mountains with ease but he knew that a successful transition required complete surrender. He waited out the few minutes of extreme vulnerability, gagging and shaking as he called every atom of his self into human form. It was an act of will that sent his angelic limbs into human limbs, his skull pounding under the pressure as his vast mind settled into nerves and gray matter.
Eventually the vessel extracted the contents of its stomach onto the ground in a small pile of steaming semi digested food. The child peered at it, wrinkling her nose.
"Ya sick mister?" She was shouting at full volume, given that her eardrums had burst.
"Of course I'm sick" he mumbled past the vile taste in his mouth, "I've just been slam dunked into reality at the speed of light. Smarts like a bitch, don't you know?"
He wasn't lying about the pain, but he doubted the human could ever understand the extent of it. Physically, which was a loose term for angels anyway, he was in one piece, including his wings which had already folded themselves away and out of sight. There was no human body equivalent for wings, but it needed only a simple glamour to hide them. There were Rules about such things. Lucifer had never been one for following those, but in this case he had always agreed. One mere glimpse of his celestial form on Earth could shatter minds, start wars, ruin the whole concept of faith and basically set the whole human experiment back a few thousand years. It had happened before.
But the pain that wracked him now was far older and no less potent. Encased in human flesh, the soul bruising and heart crushing pain of being cut off from Heaven was consuming. He was used to it of course, having spent many millennia away from the Light, but what made it bearable was now gone. Overseeing Hell gave him an endless outlet to express the anger and rage of the outcast. Channeled through the flesh, he could lay waste to the humans around him if he wanted, except there would be no fun in that, not at all. One of the mightiest battles Lucifer would ever wage was within himself but there was many a time when he cursed the day he'd discovered that he loved the humans, faults and all.
Tears still fell from the vessel though as he relived his Fall and the devastation of his soul. He hoped fervently that no one he knew was watching. For a moment he opened his ears to the angelic wavelength, hearing only the soothing song from smaller angels, seraphs and cherubs, higher tiered beings who never left Heaven and never concerned themselves with the Earth. There was no alarm, no sounding of war horns such as others of his lineage might use as they hunted him down. He hadn't been missed, yet. They would find him eventually of course and perhaps they might allow him a few days amongst the mortal herd as they had before. Except Lucifer had no intention of going back, not this time. He wondered who would draw the short straw and be made to come and fetch the fallen one. He laughed as he looked around himself, sitting as he was in the dust and junk of a vacant lot, somewhere in the vicinity of Las Vegas, a hellbound city if there ever was one. He hoped his would-be repo angel was one of the really good ones, because that would be all the more fun to watch.
He stood up slowly, immediately impressed with his height and straight clean limbs. His clothes hung in smoking tatters, his body only now cooling from the furnace that the changes would have generated. Taking a step felt like walking through mud with lead boots on, but he knew he would get used to it. And, for all the uncomfortable squelchy feelings that physical flesh gave him, he knew there were many more that would delight. His new skin tingled at the thought.
The child was getting bored, he could see. Apparently he wasn't going to be doing anything more exciting than vomiting, crying and laughing. Much like any regular homeless person with a tenuous grip on reality might do.
The comparison was apt.