In the Beginning

Disclaimer: Characters and premise are the property of Kazue Kato. I'm just borrowing them for a little non-profit fun.

Chapter Three: Return

As time passed Satan explored the limits of his prison. Gradually he grew accustom to the loss of his wings. The twitching of his, now useless, flight muscles never really ceased, but it lessened. After a time his posture and gait shifted, his subconscious stopped expect the presence of his wings and the constant feeling of being off-balance ceased.

Satan had no need for sustenance. There was nothing within his prison that could cause him harm. But after Assiah the lack of stimulation was torturous. There was simply nothing except empty white walls, ceilings and floors within his reach. When he tried pressing past the walls to enter Gehenna-proper, their substance no longer accepted him. And no matter how he searched he couldn't find a way back to the portal into Assiah's sky. So in the empty halls he remained. There was no sound but the echoes of his own footsteps or of his raised voice. There was no Eve. For well-over half his existence she had been his purpose, the center of all that he did, without her it felt like there was no reason for him to exist.

For the lack of anything better to do, he spent a long time examining his own body. How it had changed, been forged into something new in the heat of the blue flames he'd stolen from the depths of Gehenna. Angels were uniformly, perfectly beautiful: Of a single height and build, their faces all identically pleasing; perfectly portioned and perfectly bland in their repetition. Now Satan found his body had become leaner, the muscles more starkly defined. His fingers terminated in razor-like claws where he hadn't even possessed the flimsy nails that graced human hands before. Everything about him had become sharp and angular: pointed ears, jagged teeth, a narrow nose and short horns rising from his temples making his skull even more starkly triangular instead of the oval that was standard for angels. Following the loss of his wings he'd grown a tail. Satan hypothesized that it had grown in response to the amputation. The tail aided his balance, gave him back a measure of control over his center of gravity which he'd always unconsciously adjusted by moving his wings.

After exhausting his interest in his changed body and having mapped out every inch of the massive maze that was his prison, driven nearly mad by boredom, he tried to break out, clawing, beating and screaming at the walls until his hands and feet were broken.

He woke up healed and in a different place. Instead of the endless white walls he saw blackness through a translucent wall before him and the rivers of God-Fire cutting through the fog of outer Gehenna behind him. The Void was something new, something different from the white halls that had been his world for so long. Satan stared out into the darkness. Eventually he noticed millions of tiny colored wisps flittering about, huddling close to the mass of Gehenna's outer membrane as if it's nearness provided some shelter from the Void. The human souls they'd summoned, Satan realized.

Satan wondered how much time had passed. Was Eve still on Assiah or had she died and become one of those flitting wisps? He stared out the window endlessly, trying to count all of them, trying to determine if Eve were among them.

"There are fourteen billion of them," the Presence said suddenly. "And more are still coming."

Satan jumped and cringed away from the Presence.

"You've become something unintended," the Presence told him, maintaining a distance. "You can't be allowed to run amuck until I understand what you are."

Satan understood it as a poor apology for locking him away from Assiah and possibly for not repairing his wings.

For a long time they observed the human souls in the void.

"There must be others like me," the Presence stated. "I have never encountered one, but I am sure of it. I must have come from somewhere. Left to their own devices the human population would be more scattered, they would have found others to aid them. But you called them all here. All you could reach. If I had the resources I could create bodies for them until there were so many that they couldn't take a single step without bumping into each other and still only a fraction of them would fit within Assiah. I am doing all I can. I am reordering myself. When it is done I will destroy the current Assiah and replace it with something larger. I've given them the means to create forms to populate Assiah. They will have survive but they will suffer hardship as I stretch myself thinner."

"What do I care?" Satan replied.

"You went to so much effort to save them."

"For her, always for her. What good is saving them if it means being separated from her?" Satan demanded.

Then the Presence was gone and Satan was alone again.

After that the Presence would appear from time to time and they would talk.

Gradually Satan discovered that that he had been granted access to more and more of Gehenna. Eventually he started seeing angels going about their business again. When they saw him they quickly hurried away. They backed away, never taking their eyes off him as if he were a horrifically dangerous beast. In time he located the portal to Assiah, for all the good it did him without wings, but it provided a window on the world.

"Perhaps I was too late to prevent the spread of your infection," the Presence said, observing the angel's reaction to Satan. "Or perhaps none of you were what I believed you to be when I made you. If they were merely the cells of my body they wouldn't fear you."

"Long ago one of them speculated that you made the humans to give us something to care for," Satan replied.

"If it were an infection, it has been spreading among you for some time. Or perhaps you, all of you, have been aware of yourselves as individuals since the beginning," the Presence said, acknowledging the proof of his mistake. "The humans are terribly weak when they first come from the Void. Caring for them is complex, you had to be made complex to perform your function."

Satan looked disinterested. He didn't particularly care that it was an accident that he and the other angels were sentient, not simple automatons. He had always known what he was, how he came about didn't matter to him. It had happened, that was the end of it.

"The humans' new method of creating physical forms is an improvement," the Presence continued. "The first ones took centuries to even begin recovering from the Void. The bodies they make for themselves come into Assiah incomplete but the process of growing their bodies to adulthood with their souls in place integrates them more thoroughly with the energies of Assiah. They gain resilience much faster. I can shorten their rotation on Assiah, it will will allow them all to survive."

"Is my Eve out there, suffering the Void already, as punishment for wanting to save them? Satan demanded.

"It's not a punishment," the Presence stated. "It is the cost they must bear that I may save them. I had believed I would be forced to allow some of them to perish in the Void, but if their rotation on Assiah may be shortened then all their lives may yet be preserved."

"Is she out there?!" Satan shouted.

"The first humans to find refuge in me had progressed greatly in their recovery. It is likely that they will always be somewhat different than those whom you called to me. Their energy has not yet waned. Unless an accident has befallen her she remains in Assiah."

Knowing Eve still lived didn't make Satan any less resentful of his captivity. Conversation kept the boredom manageable, at least it kept the urge to beat himself bloody against the walls at bay, but he wasn't grateful. He wandered the halls sullenly, scaring the angels from time to time.

There was no measure of time in white halls, no changes to observe and give its passage meaning. Still Satan assumed that it had been a long, directionless, time that he'd been trapped there. Then he felt an overpowering pull: Eve hurt. She was shocked and confused and hurt past bearing and he had to go, he'd promised her.

The drive to go to her bypassed all reason. There was no conscious decision, he was simply running for the portal. His lack of wings didn't register until well after he'd thrown himself into the sky. For a moment as he fell, blue flames erupted from the scars on his back forming empyreal ghosts of his lost wings but he didn't have the strength to make them solid enough to support him.

He closed his eyes and turned his head away, expecting to shatter to pieces when his body struck the ground. He'd failed, his promise to Eve would be broken, he'd done everything he could to go to her and it wasn't enough. But when he hit, the ground absorbed him as the walls of Gehenna refused to. It wasn't the same, matter in Assiah had been differentiated into many things, but all of Assiah had once been Gehenna before it was given form and it accepted him back.

And he was back, he'd made it back to Assiah. Satan quickly learned that he couldn't reform his body from the ground as he had from Gehenna. Gehenna was fluid, an undifferentiated continuum. In Assiah water had been parted from water, matter had been given names and shapes and it couldn't be willed into something new, not by him.

Eve's shock faded into anger, but the pain remained. Satan had returned to Assiah but still didn't have the means to go to her. But he was closer, he searched relentlessly. Then he sensed another, also filled with frustrated worry for Eve, also unable to find the means to reach out to her and comfort her. The similarity drew them together. Feeling the slight pull, the something new introduced into his environment, Satan rushed forward. He forced himself into this new possibility with the finesse of a freight train.

Satan opened eyes and stared down at slim, long-fingered hands that terminated in flimsy, human nails. He stood, his balance slightly off due to the lack of a tail, but the body he found himself in had it's own reflexes and he quickly adjusted. Finally he had the means to go to Eve.

He found himself in a rude camp. From the pull he sensed, his new body had already been going after Eve before he took it. Without bothering to pack up the camp Satan set out after Eve. He walked through the day. Aches developed in his feet and legs. A different sort of ache filled his belly. Ages of tending to humans informed him that he should stop to rest and eat, but he'd left all the supplies his body had thought to bring behind and his promise to Eve drove him onward.

As the sun began to set that night he saw a thin column of smoke rising in the distance. A short while later he came upon another camp, less slap-dash and better supplied than the one he'd abandoned that morning. Eve crouched beside the fire, using a long stick to stir it into burning hotter. Her hair had grown long again and was streaked with white, but she moved with the same sure grace that he remembered from before age had touched her. When she saw him she stood abruptly, brandishing the stick threateningly. "I told you I never wanted to see you again! You sided with Him against our son!" she exclaimed. Then she stopped and blinked at him. "Your eyes… They're blue, not grey" she trailed off, the stick wavered. "Satan?"

"I told you I'd always be there for you. Whatever you need."

"I need to be away from there," Eve said vehemently. "I need to be away from reminders, away from all of them, from everyone you whispered and whispered that there must have been something wrong with my son all along that his offering was rejected." Tears welled up in Eve's eyes.

"Don't cry!" Satan said desperately. "Tell me what I can do to make it better."

"There's nothing that can be done, it's beyond any fixing. Able is dead and Cain is a murderer. My first two babies are both utterly lost. None of this would have happened if He hadn't played favorites!" Eve exploded. "There are no amends, no turning back time. Not for any of us." She sighed. The only thing that can be done now is to move on, to start over."

"We can do that," Satan said. He couldn't imagine anything better than being the chance to take her away.

Many cycles later Satan woke to the sound of hushed conversation outside of the isolated home he and Eve had made for themselves. He reached over and shook her awake. "There's a crowd outside."

Eve frowned. "I grew tired of running while you were gone. Let's see what they want."

They dressed and stepped outside. And stared, bewildered, at the dozens of pairs gathered before their home. Precisely half of the crowd were identical. Clearly angels despite the lack of wings. Each one stood with a human partner.

One of the wingless angels moved to the fore of the crowd. "Satan, we wish to follow you," he said. "The Presence is calling us back to Gehenna and those who go do not return. We have decided to ignore the Presence's call. Like you, we have found a human who's hold on us is stronger still."

"So do as you please," Satan said turning to go back inside.

"We cut off our wings," the speaker continued. "As yours were torn from you. We've severed our connection to Gehenna. Even if we should experience a moment of weakness and wish to answer the call we all still hear; day in and day out we hear the Presence calling us away; but we no longer have the option of answering. We've passed the point of no return, please don't turn us away. Teach us how to live as you do... I'm Paimon, this is Jubal, my soulmate."

Satan glanced at Eve and she nodded. "You may join us," he said. Then he saw Paimon try to discreetly ignore the twitching of his severed flight muscles and remembered his own wounds after losing his wings and the strangeness of his body after their amputation. He prodded the embers of the blue fire that had settled into his bones into life.

In moments the flames had engulfed the crowd. Rather than simply healing their wounds as he'd intended, Satan felt his flames reach out for the sparks of individuality that had driven the gathered angels to rebel. The flames excite those sparks, giving them the power to manifest physically. When the flames receded the formerly identical angels had been transformed. In echo of the uniqueness of their spirits their bodies had taken on a wild variety of shapes and colors.

Eve stepped forward. For a long moment she simply looked over the assembled group, letting them look back at her.

"In the beginning," she said, "God created a paradise for a few badly injured human refugees that he stumbled across in the Void and created angels to serve them, to care for them as one cares for a child. We humans are not children any more, angels do not exist simple to serve our needs. We are partners, equals. Together, no longer as angel and human but as one we will create our own paradise which will outshine the one lost to us."

The crowd cheered.

Eighty years later in a large home at the center of a thriving community, Eve died shortly after giving birth to her thirteenth set of twins.

"You should come see them at least," Paimon cajoled. "They're your children… They're her children."

Satan sneered, "Am I supposed to see my Eve when I look at those squalling brats? All I see is her killers."

"You don't mean that," Paimon said. "I know how you feel. I felt the same when Jubal passed on. Right now, it seems like there's nothing in the world but pain. It gets better. If you don't let yourself love those two boys now, you'll come to regret it."

Satan turned and started walking off.

"She named the fair one Lucifer. His younger brother is Samael," Paimon shouted after him. "They both have vestigial wings. The midwife thought they should be removed but I told her to wait for your decision. They're your children."

"Do whatever you like with them," Satan snapped. "Drown them in the river for all I care."

"Once you've held them you'll know you don't mean that," Paimon insisted. "And Eve will be born again, you just have to be patient. Could you look her in the eye when she returns if you neglect the children you had with her?"

Satan turned angrily back to the other wingless angel, "You may be content to sit patiently and wait for your soulmate to be reborn. I am not. I will do whatever it takes to get her back. Those brats would simply be in my way. Don't bother me about them again or I will drown the both of them!"

"I can't force you to change your mind," Paimon sighed. "I only wish that you'd believe me when I say you'll feel differently once your loss is not so fresh."