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Thank you.

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Chapter Two

Hope

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Sometimes, Aziraphale wondered how long he'd been here.

It was hard to tell the passage of time when there were no days to count by, and no distinctive landmarks to help measure the distance travelled. It was perpetual night here, with a million shining stars twinkling above his head, bathing everything in silvery light, almost as bright as the light of day. The desert through which he passed, too, was ever the same: sweeping plains of black sand, fine as flour, never stirred by wind, dotted with low dunes, and cut from horizon to horizon by a meandering path. The mountains, far, far away, never seemed to come any closer.

Truth be told, none of this bothered him. The unchanging black-and-white starkness of his surroundings acted on him as a kind of anodyne, a kind of relief, when the vile sludge that had been his life came bubbling up higher than he could stand.

He was a demon.

He was a demon, and what a monster, what a complete insane monster he had been in life. Killing and murder, killing and murder and torture, his indifferent delights, always, always done with a smile and a tranquil... not a tranquil mind, for that he had never had, but a tranquil heart, certainly. Never once in his entire physical existence, whether in Hell or on Earth, had he seen himself as anything less than righteous. Never once, until he came here, had he seen himself for the living horror he truly was. He'd thought himself a saint.

Monster.

Still, underneath the helpless resignation of realisation - for he could not undo the past, no matter how he wanted to - far underneath, the feeling of hurt, of having been wronged, remained lingering, all the time.

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Back when he had only been here for a few... years, he supposed... he had taken up the habit of sitting down every now and then, by the side of the path he followed, to rest for a little while. It was at those times, when his now curiously clear mind was no longer even partially occupied with walking, that he would feel a stirring deep inside him somewhere, an incredibly vague sensation of having forgotten something. Or rather, of not having quite forgotten it, as though it - or they, if it was a person; Aziraphale wasn't sure - had been covered in a heavy veil, impossible to peer through.

If he remained seated for too long, things would develop, and he'd get an uneasy feeling of additional guilt, as though whatever it was that he'd let slip from his memories, was something that it was unpardonable not to be able to recall. Something ancient, vastly familiar. But the more he'd try to remember, with all his might, what it was, the further it would retreat behind the veil. Honestly, it was rather maddening.

As soon as he'd get up and start to walk, though, the feeling would disappear, leaving not a trace behind.

Or hardly a trace, at any rate.

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There was something glimmering in the distance. He stopped, squinted, trying to make out what it was.

Hmmm... It reminded him of the way a pane of glass, or the surface of a pool, would reflect the light of the moon. Or of the stars, in this place.

Oh, nonsense. Such things simply didn't exist, here in the endless desert. Here, there were only sand, stars, night, a path... and him, all alone. It was just his eyes playing tricks on him, nothing more. He shook his head in annoyance at himself, and went on walking.

After about a minute, he stopped again, blinked. Wait a moment, the outline of the thing... That almost looked like... like a...

He broke into a run, and kept on running until he was some ten feet away from it, at which point he stopped, astonished. So he'd been right. His sight hadn't deceived him, after all.

It was a mirror. A big, old-fashioned mirror, seven feet tall and four feet wide, with black glass, and with a frame of what looked like ebony, elaborately carved in a repeating pattern of flames. It stood there, across the path, upright and unsupported by anything, the first earthly object he'd seen in, well, in a very long time, and it frightened Aziraphale to the marrow.

It looked so strange, so alien, so utterly out of place in the landscape, so... normal, in short, that it was a fiendish abnormality, an unwelcome relic from a world he'd left behind - or had been made to leave behind, whichever, he couldn't recall - and he wanted to get away from it, get back to the safety of monotony... But then he began to feel curious. That wasn't regular glass.

Cautiously, hesitantly, he approached it, and examined the smooth surface. It was indeed completely black, and it did indeed reflect the starlight, but on closer inspection, there was something swirling here and there, rather like he imagined the sand would, were there ever any wind. He tapped it with a finger. It was dry, and resilient, but it rippled a little when he touched it. He blinked again. What in the...

And then, in the space of half a second, the screen of whatever-it-was was swept clean from the inside. Aziraphale squeaked in surprise, staggered back, and fell down. He stayed like that, staring and gaping at the picture that had been revealed.

Hastur and Ligur.

In Hell, being tortured.

Aziraphale believed he could have named the very chamber they were in. And no wonder. Watching the goings-on in those sections of the Pit had once been one of his favoured pastimes, after all. He clenched his teeth and pressed a fist against his mouth, as a wave of nausea and self-loathing washed over him.

Monster... Monster... God... Have mercy...

Sweating, shaking, and dry heaving, he looked again at the tableau before him. Hastur, naked, twisting like a worm on burning sand, face contorted in a soundless scream, fingers bent like claws, rending the air. Ligur, sitting or standing in a lava stream, with, incredibly, a calm, rather pensive expression.

Slowly, something began to dawn on Aziraphale, working its way through the nausea. Hastur and Ligur were in Hell, condemned to everlasting torment - for, somehow, it didn't even occur to Aziraphale to doubt the reality of what the mirror showed him - and he, who had killed them, he was here, free of pain, of physical pain at least, sentenced to nothing more than moving through a desert and thinking on his life, which punishment, however nightmarish it often was, might, for all he knew, come to an end, someday.

Odd.

Why this difference? Had he not been far worse than they? Perhaps, and he trembled in fear at the thought, perhaps he had, accordingly, been destined for far worse a fate. But then, why had he seen no signs of this yet, after so long? He frowned. That wouldn't make any sense. Of course, a great many things had never made sense to him. Like why it was apparently right to be damned for thinking the wrong thought, at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

The old hurt came surging up again, but there was no flaring of fury inside him now, as this memory went through his mind. No: he'd come to terms with his true nature, long ago. Not with his deeds, oh no, but with what he was. After all, there could be even more terrible things than merely being a demon.

He smiled, albeit wryly, at the change that had taken place within him, with time and reflection, when a jolt of fierce agony went through him, like a slice at his heartstrings, and he shrieked and his voice shredded the silence and for a single instant he'd been about to peek under the veil, had been at the very edge of remembering...

Then the moment was gone, and he lay looking up at the stars without seeing them, panting and spreadeagled, wondering what in the world had just happened. He felt, for some reason, that it was connected with his thinking about a state more terrible than... Oh, never mind. His mind was much too foggy for that right now.

But he did understand something else, now, spiritual shocks notwithstanding. The image in the mirror, whoever, whatever had sent it, was meant to do one thing and one thing only: to tell him that he was destined, not for something worse, as he had briefly feared, but for something better... He had no idea how he knew this, exactly, but he was certain of it, nevertheless. And it felt good.

There was a curious sort of whooshing sound.

Aziraphale looked up, and found that the mirror was gone. All that was left of it was a heap of sand on the path.

Aziraphale got up, gingerly stepped over the heap, and continued on his way.