Raphael
Storms raged across the eastern portion of the continent known as North America as Heaven's second-in-command graced the defiant Michael Sword and a rebel angel with his presence.
"It is a testament to my unending mercy that I don't smite you hear and now," Raphael spoke with the voice and language of his brown-skinned human vessel. Though he still could and would prefer to speak with the multitudinous voices of his twenty true faces, the Michael Sword had already proved unable to handle communication from Castiel.
Said once-respected three-faced angel now foolishly stood before the archangel who obliterated him in the very vessel that Raphael had torn apart. A fact which Raphael unfortunately found gave him pause. While the reconstruction of a human rended at a molecular level would be nigh-thoughtless work for Raphael, the perfect reassembly of an erupted angel befuddled him. For it was beyond him, and Raphael was almost certain it was beyond Michael.
Only two beings in existence demonstrated the capacity for such a feat. Lucifer, the golden Morningstar who was Creation's greatest designer. Or the very Creator of all.
"Maybe you're full of crap," the Michael Sword haughtily accused. "Maybe you're afraid that God will bring Cas back to life again and smite you and your candy-ass skirt."
Though the human meant its words to be insulting, Raphael spared not a single thought on the nonsensical phrasing. What very much affronted the archangel was the mortal's audacity — and the veracity of its assertion that Raphael had never stopped fearing his long absent father.
"By the way, hi, I'm Dean," the human presented itself.
"I know what you are," Raphael cut off.
"And know thanks to him," Raphael said in reference of the rebel angel he had smote, "I know where you are."
"You won't kill him," Castiel insisted, finally summoning the will to speak in the face of the ocean's worth of terror he felt.
"You wouldn't dare," Castiel finished with a fading whisper that demonstrated how little he dared to speak to Raphael.
Still, the archangel could appreciate the traits which once made Castiel one of Heaven's greatest soldiers. Few angels dared behold an archangel at all, and Raphael doubted even the lead Seraph Zachariah would have the courage to utter anything but prayers for a speedy smiting had he been in Castiel's position.
"But I will take him to Michael," Raphael said of the Michael Sword.
"Now that…sounds terrifying. It does," said Michael Sword attempted to mock in a voice of strained bravado. "But uh…I hate to tell you. I'm not going anywhere with you."
The human furthered his act by turning his back to Raphael and drawing forth an inebriant in a projection of casualness. The waves of fear exuding from the human were quite palpable, however.
Even so, Raphael found himself irked that a mortal would muster the will to speak as this thing did. So as to vent his frustration, but not reveal it to the rebel and the rebellious sword, Raphael intensified the violence of his hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms everywhere in the eastern regions of the continent that fell outside of Castiel's daily diminishing angelic perceptions.
Standing in the very presence of even a slightly-miffed Lucifer would have this thing clawing at its very soul, Raphael could not help but think as he regained enough control of himself to speak once more in a calm and collected human voice.
"Surely you remember Zachariah giving you stomach cancer?" Raphael reminded the insolent mortal.
"Yah. That was…that was hilarious," it responded with a still intact but rapidly fading air of bravado.
"Well," Raphael responded, a small smile breaking out on his vessel's face as the Michael Sword began to visibly crack. "He doesn't have anything close to my imagination."
This truth did not simply come from the fact that Raphael possessed far greater age and exponentially more complex perceptions than Heaven's foremost seraph. But unlike all of God's other creations save one, Raphael had been born into chaos and tumult of universal proportions. Raphael first conscious experience was to behold the cosmic struggle between a nigh-infinite Light and an equal and opposite Darkness. Such sensations would have instantly obliterated a lesser being, and they would have destroyed him in short order had the two-dozen faced Lucifer not informed Raphael of the situation and how to conduct himself so as to survive.
Raphael's created purpose, as the Morningstar informed him, was to regenerate his older brothers from any strain and damage they sustained while utilizing their power alongside their father's to give him the slightest edge against his sister. Raphael had unfortunately not been created as a peer to Michael and Lucifer. Indeed, in the then absence of inferior beings, Raphael spent his formative years as little more than a servant. But he had been created to perceive the functions and conditions of God's creations on a fundamental level, and his training from Lucifer provided him with the knowledge of how to restore balance and order to anything in a less than its best physical state.
Naturally, Raphael was quite capable of performing the reverse in nearly infinite ways. And Michael's impudent vessel would soon know tortures beyond anything the demon leaders Azazel and Lilith could have ever envisioned during their existences. And that would be just a taste of the third archangel's imagination.
"I bet you didn't imagine one thing," the mortal impudently insisted as Raphael walked his vessel toward his quarry.
"What," Raphael drawled, with some of his irritation seeping into the baritone human voice of his vessel.
"We know you were coming, you stupid son of a bitch," the mortal responded in a confident voice.
A confidence that truly reflected the emotions within the Michael Sword.
The befuddlement Raphael felt from the idea of his ambush being anticipated, and the implication that the ring of Holy Fire he had dissipated at the hospital before retaking his vessel had been the snare to lull him into a false sense of security, disoriented the archangel long enough that by the time he realized he stood in another ring of Holy Oil…
A cigarette lighter connected with it an iota of a second later, giving Raphael barely enough time to tightly fold his dozen pairs of green-white ethereal wings about his corporeal vessel, lest any part of his being be singed by the flames.
Stunned for so many reasons he could barely hear his thoughts for one, Raphael surveyed his predicament through the eyes of his vessel.
But first and foremost among the archangel's emotions lay shame. Shame that two pests somehow managed to outwit him and nullify his ability to exercise his practically infinitely greater power.
And for their own part, Castiel and the Michael Sword radiated tsunamis worth of shock from their faces, pheromones, and spirits. For even they understood that their plot should have failed. And yet it did not. And in spite of Raphael's wishes, the very first thoughts that surfaced above the cosmic ocean of bewilderment in him was —
This would have never happened to your brothers.
Throughout his entire existence, Raphael fought to rise above the implications and indictments of inferiority from his closest kin. From the very beginning, his assigned role in relation to Michael and Lucifer was that of assistant. An assistant who could be easily bullied and even smote to oblivion by his much more powerful brothers. And for however much the white-shining Michael and the golden-glowing Lucifer competed for their father's favor, never was the slightest thought spared to the idea of Raphael being the favorite.
And the proof showcased itself in the present moment. The power Michael and Lucifer held would extinguish a paltry ring of Holy Fire in a fraction of what humans called a minute. And if either elder archangel chose to walk through the flames, all traces of agony and affliction would be washed away in less time than it took light to travel from the Earth to what English-speaking humans called Mars.
Now, Holy Fire would not kill Raphael — or even Gabriel for that matter. But it would take him much longer to regenerate from such devastating damage than it would his older brothers. However, as the steadily intensifying rushes of electricity and resulting booms of thunder in the surrounding landscape demonstrated, Raphael was not powerless in his current predicament. Although he found himself so limited that he could not perform a non-contact smiting, his power still exceeded that of his quarry. And they knew this.
"Don't look at me, it was his idea!" the Michael Sword cowardly deflected blame as his fear-induced pallor approached the color of the lightning reflecting off of his face.
As the two conspirators exchanged looks following the Michael Sword's insipid betrayal, the raging winds, jagged lightning, and pounding rain increasing reverberated the anthem of Raphael's rage.
"Where is he?" Castiel suddenly and impudently demanded of the archangel.
"God?" Raphael voiced the name in Castiel's simple mind in an acerbic, condescending tone. "Didn't you hear? He's dead, Castiel."
"Dead," Raphael repeated, but in a somber and mournful voice.
Energy was never lost. The nigh-infinite energy that God embodied would last forever and ever, even once the end of entropy forced dispersed the energy so much that God's person would remerge with the Darkness he separated from at the dawn of this cosmic age. And just as God's beginning birthed the current age of existence, so to would his cessation close it.
However, as far as this universe was concerned, all that remained of God were imprints and residues of His once vivid majesty. His person and being had long absconded to other segments of existence. And though Michael refused to hear it, Raphael knew there to be a legion of universes an archangel grace-rift away from the one they existed in. The third archangel found a measure of comfort in that even among the universes which contained archangels — many of which were mere copies of Raphael and his brothers — scarce few held traces of God power that approached what the first universe contained.
Regardless, with the myriad of realities and realms that Raphael beheld — each as equally abandoned as his own, Raphael knew that all these were dead to God. Nothing more than failed drafts to the cosmic writer. Perhaps an infinite impulse to create drove the Light to keep generating an ever expanding number universes, dimensions, and timelines. But regardless of the cause, a reality dead to God had a dead God. For what seemed to be a hundred thousand Earth revolutions of the Creator's absence clearly was eons to Him.
"There's no other explanation, He's gone for good," Raphael softly stated.
"You're lying," Castiel accused.
"Am I?" Raphael questioned. "Do you remember the twentieth century? Think the twenty-first is going any better? You think God would have let any of that happen if He were alive?"
In that line of inquiry, Raphael spoke to the instinctive programming of the sub-Seraphim class of angels. The truth was, Lucifer had always been right about humanity. There never had been a day Raphael disagreed with his older brother's assessments of the species, and every day humanity proved them right. Proved them right as those putrid primates raped and pillaged the once perfect planet their Creator bestowed upon them.
"Oh yeah? Then who invented the Chinese basket trick?" the Michael Sword said sardonically.
It had been for the majesty and power of the Lord that Raphael debased himself before Adam and Eve, and for that alone. And every time the archangel heard a human speak, that memory brought new waves of shame and humiliation. But for Michael's Sword to degrade the Father of All so?
"Careful, that's my Father you're talking about boy," Raphael reprimanded firmly.
Had it not been for the cursed flames God had gifted humanity with, Raphael would have smote the ignorant ape a dozen times over.
"Yeah, who would be so proud to know that his sons started the frickin Apocalypse!" the Michael Sword brashly returned.
"Who ran off and disappeared!" Raphael vented before he could catch himself. "Who left…no instructions. And a worldto run!"
A world that should have been cleansed of the disease of humanity many millennia agone. But Michael insisted that God would return, and that they would suffer "His Holy Wrath" if they violated their oath to humanity. And that in the absence of the Lord, Michael would enforce "His Will."
"So daddy ran away and disappeared," the impudent Michael Sword ran his mouth again. "He didn't happen to work for the post office, did he?"
From the looks the human exchanged with Castiel, Raphael deduced that the Almighty God had just been reduced to an inside joke.
"Is this funny to you?" Raphael asked genuinely. "You're living in a Godless universe."
"And?" the Michael Sword testily started. "What, you and the other kids just decide to throw an Apocalypse while He's gone?"
Raphael felt his vessel express a frown at this. The Michael Sword's presumption held great inaccuracy. For the Apocalypse was not their creation, but rather the completion of God's final command.
Well remembered in Heaven was the day Raphael scourged Lucifer's conquered minions — a traitorous third of the Holy Host and the nephilim they sired and bore in human vessels. But only three in the universe — himself, Lucifer, and Michael — knew that God had not ordered the Devil to be captured and humiliated before the remaining members of the Host. But rather executed. Smote to infinitesimal shards by the High Prince of Heaven at the conclusion of their grand duel that left the Earth in an ice age.
But Michael could not bring himself to do this. He dragged and tossed the defeated Lucifer about Heaven for all the angels to see. But to obliterate the brother he spent such a number of eons with that it made Raphael a fledgling by comparison? Michael could not obey this command of the Lord.
And though Michael would always blame Lucifer's rebellion for driving God away, the Commander of the Host in truth blamed himself and yearned for redemption. Lucifer, for his part, came to see his imprisonment as a fate worse than the death that could potentially follow a rematch with Michael. And Raphael knew that without God to contain the effects of the elder archangels' power, the peripheral blast-waves from their battle would exterminate humanity. And though much damage would be done to the Earth, Raphael was confident that an archangel grace possessed the necessary power to restore the world to its prime glory. Its state before the humans defiled it.
Together, the three primordial angels deciphered every clue their Father had ever left. They managed to deduce the six-hundred and six seals that locked Lucifer's Cage, and the seals which had to serve as the first and final of the sixty-six that needed to be broken. They even managed to piece together cryptic comments their Father had made of the bloodlines of Cain and Abel, the power of the souls descended from both, and the factors of an angel's affinity for a human host to create perfect vessels for God's first sons to wear in their final showdown.
And just as their war against the Darkness brought an age of life and light to all existence, so to would the conclusion of Michael and Lucifer's war restore it to the Earth.
"We just the pain and suffering to be over," Raphael offered a truncated by substantial answer to the Michael Sword. "We just want paradise."
"So what? God dies and makes you the boss, and you think you can do whatever you want?" the Michael Sword aggressively accused.
"Yes!" Raphael boomed in answer.
Indignation filled Raphael's compressed being. Creation would not exist without he and his brothers. With a Father who forsook them, the archangels held full rights to the universe. And in Raphael's opinion, to all the universes.
"And whatever we want, we get!" Raphael declared.
The third archangel's irritation channeled itself through the previously strained link he held with his storm upon being trapped in the Holy Fire ring. A massive gale suddenly shattered the windows, bringing with it the now massive booms of thunder and precious streams of rain. Rain that promised to accumulate enough to douse the flames which imprisoned Raphael.
"If God is dead!" Castiel shouted with angelic amplification to his vessel's voice so that it might be heard over the raging winds, "then why have I returned? Who brought me back?"
"Did it ever occur to you that maybe Lucifer raised you?" Raphael answered simply.
"No," Castiel answered with projected defiance. But his true thoughts lay bare before Raphael.
"Think about it," Raphael prodded. "He needs all the rebellious angels he can find."
With the destructions of Azazel, Lilith, and Alaistair, Samhain was the last remaining demonic creation of Lucifer. The last one capable of posing a true threat to the angels of the Lord. Yet as the weakest of Lucifer's four, Samhain would fall prey to a Seraph such as Zachariah or Naomi if Heaven sought to end him promptly. And stringent few human souls possessed the potential for Lucifer to make something remarkable out of creatures he utterly despised.
Not to mention his grace proved an ample power source for those of any angel who abandoned Heaven.
"You know it adds up," Raphael stated as he stared down Castiel.
Buckling to the weight of Raphael's words and gaze, Castiel turned his vessel's head to the Michael Sword and suggested they retreat.
"Castiel!" Raphael called after the fallen angel. The power and majesty he channeled into the voice of his mere vessel caused Castiel to instantly turn all four of his heads back toward the archangel.
"I'm warning you, do not leave me here," Raphael threatened. "I will find you."
And instead of a quick end, your death will make my executions of Lucifer's original rebels seem as tales from a child's book, Raphael promised Castiel in archangelic voices inaudible to the Michael Sword.
"Maybe one day," Castiel responded in his human voice. "But today, you're my little bitch."
And with that, the rebel angel turned his back and walked away from the archangel at a casual pace. The Michael Sword followed in suit.
The storm redoubled in its intensity as its primordial master raged at the insults levied upon him. Yet this more than anything indicated his current impotence.