Sky dwellers, he's been told, don't remember being born.

They learn of it in stories told by their mothers and fathers, by nosy relatives and overly invested neighbors, embellished fictions designed to tease, to embarrass, to guilt them – bizarrely – into undertaking any number of mundane tasks.

Sandalphon remembers.

Not just hazily, in flashes that are more dream than recollection, ghostly echoes from the dawn of awareness, but like the crispness of a cloudless day, that first taste of a sense of self.

It's a memory that's never once dulled in over two thousand years, even though he's spent so much of that time wishing it would, so convinced it was a lie, a fabrication, an elaborate joke spun from yearning and misinterpretation–

Not wanting it to feel so clear and true, so horribly warm, even though his first sensation was one of biting cold. Of being thrust into the physical world suddenly and without warning, of his hands and knees – hands and knees? – hitting cold, hard tile, of his skin – skin?! – hitting sterile air, of shivering, panting, every breath a fresh shock to his body, scrabbling to cope with the flood of sensation under the dispassionate gazes of his Astral masters.

And then light, bright and strong enough to reduce him to ash without even trying, and yet the sense of a promise that it wouldn't, not now, not ever...

Eclipsing the cold, the panic, the feeling of helpless exposure, cradling him and burning away any notion of allegiance to those faceless, utterly lightless watchers–

I welcome you, Sandalphon.

This world welcomes you.

It has been wanting to meet you… for a very, very long time.

That memory is his anchor, a beacon to follow in reverse, back to the kindling of that very first ember of consciousness. To cross the threshold into near nonexistence, to retreat inside himself more completely than he ever did before, voluntarily or not.

He's returned to this stage before, he knows, but it's an abstract kind of knowledge. Back then, in the shelter of that feathery cocoon, Lucifer's kindness was what allowed him to retain a sense of self, which crafted a space where he could maintain an illusion of physicality, of sensation and input and independent, conscious thought.

There's no cradle to protect him now, no comfortable dreamland to hold on to, but he takes the plunge anyway, smashing through the barrier between being and non-being by the nothing but guiding light of that one dearly beloved, shamefully doubted, reaffirmed memory and the frantic beating of a vulture's wings.

Without either, the mass of contradictions would surely be driving him apart – perceiving time where none can pass, space where none can unfold, phantom senses recording illusory sights and sounds.

He's not sure how they arrive at the ideas that they do, insisting on a vista dipped in burnished gold, as vast as the sky itself, bands of haze and sunlight filaments twining every which way, weaving a delicate and ever-shifting web of pure self.

It's certainly nothing he could have imagined on his own, with everything so light and beautiful, so calm, not when he can't think of a time when his heart wasn't a tempest, full of emotions too violent and hungry to ever be quieted for more than moments at a time.

Is this, too, because of you? Is this because you imagined me like this, when you gave me life? Or is it because you're here with me right now, and this is your soul bringing a shine to my own?

He lets himself sink through these veils of light, some like a fine morning mist, others like brushstroke cirrus, new and transient.

Sorry, you had a feather stuck there, and fingers shyly reaching for his wings—

Thank you, it's delicious, and the clattering of many cups leaving their saucers—

I'm starting to think I'll have to turn into a night owl just to talk to you, and an insistent push to make room at the narrowest point of the ship's bow–

The sunset being sheathed, I sit and think of you– the holy city which is your face– and the hasty, red-cheeked shredding of a page–

A blink, and they're gone, carried off like fireflies in a summer breeze, tiny fragments of a life he's still not sure is his to fully claim. He lets them slip away, these reminders of the waking world, grateful for their presence but all too aware that they won't be of any help with the task before him.

There is no map, and no road for him to take anyway, not even the passive knowledge of the Supreme Primarch to rely on, only the blurry, feverish jumble of impressions from that fateful day above the Grim Basin.

They rise up without any effort at all, diaphanous and golden just like the others, though their brush is like a slow-moving burn, whispering of agony and panic – even without a body, every atom of him remembers what it felt like to be breaking apart, and just how deep the fissures reached, how close they came to his absolute center, the simple, vital recognition of an "I."

The non-space around him shudders, the veils of light trembling uncertainly, and even bodiless as he is, Sandalphon can't quite suppress the desire to curl up and clutch himself against that existential terror. In here, without actual fists to clench and teeth to grit, without the grounding sensation of physical resistance, a memory is as good as the real thing, vivid and present like no time has passed at all – splintering, disintegrating, his willpower a drop of water to quell the volcano threatening to burst forth and scatter everything like so much ash–

/Oh, will you just get a grip, you pathetic fucking /child/./

It's comforting, in a way, to realize that body or no body, shame and anger are still the blades to pierce the murky tangles of his thoughts, cutting a swath of clarity and certainty – he wasn't the one who waded into that inferno, with nothing less than his very soul on the line, to shatter the laws of reality by being so foolishly, terribly, sacrificially giving–

At the time, his consciousness was already too scattered to retain more than the barest glimpses of that healing light, but it's his core itself that remembers, awash in its gentle insistence for a timeless eternity.

~You mustn't break...~

~You /will/ not break~

~My solace, my dearest light, you are /strong/~

He can't help but reach for that thought, to try and cup its iridescent shimmer and hold it close, less for any truth and more for the essence contained therein – that care, that fondness, that sincerity, an unshakable conviction despite all evidence to the contrary–

I'm not worth that, I'll never be worth any of that–!

~Know that I want this world to contain You, who is the world to me...~

—only to nearly stumble and drop it when it unfolds into another thought, like petals opening to reveal a radiant center whose sweetness is almost too much to bear.

I— why in the skies would you say that, why would you /think/— how, what am I supposed to do with this– you can't expect me to— you /can't/—

/Hello? Are we back in pathetic fucking child mode already?/

The fiery slice is more than welcome, cutting through the torrent of near hysteria, the inability to fathom that he could ever mean this much to anyone, let alone– let alone–

/God, can't you postpone your tender heart crisis for ten seconds? You've got the chance to do something for Him for once in your stupid, pointless life, so will you just get /on/ with it already?!/

It's not enough to make him stop reeling, but it's enough to push him to refocus on the essence of the thought he's still clutching, rather than the sentiment.

The Supreme Primarch's power is all around him, suffusing his core with possibility waiting to be made real. He's always refused to see it as his own, partly so as not to forget the sin that allowed him to inherit it in the first place, but more because he never wanted it to stop feeling like a piece of Lucifer, his grace and gravitas. And now, he knows it is nothing but a pale mirage, a shadow fragment of the real person, rendered distinct and almost easy to ignore by just one glimpse of that sacred, most beautiful of souls.

Lucifer-sama.

Closing his eyes, he lets go of that tiny grain of stardust.

He still has no map, and no road to tread on, and yet, the path ahead is clear. There's only one place Lucifer's soul could possibly be, the same place he has always been — at the bedrock of Sandalphon's own.

*.*.*.*.*

TBC

Author's Notes: Yep, that one line is shamelessly stolen from an E.E. Cummings poem because that kind of worshipful soft eroticism is just the sort of thing Sandalphon would think up on accident and then go defenestrate himself for. (The Grandcypher has a window repair budget just for him, and it's always exhausted.)

Also the aesthetic for Sandalphon's core was inspired by the Xibalba nebula in The Fountain. Go watch it, it's a gorgeous, utterly confusing movie.