Muse by Rebecca Lim
K’el takes up position in front of one of the giant video screens, as five others, all over the room, do the same — pull themselves free of the human hosts they’d hidden themselves in, coalescing and assuming their customary forms. All of them are male and, to my eyes, all are luminescent.
They position themselves equidistantly, three behind Luc, three behind Ryan. Six archangels. All lethal, all familiar, all beautiful.
It begins.
The humans in this vast space are so busy looking at me that they haven’t registered the six of them faintly silhouetted against the chaotic wall of ever-changing video screens. From beneath my downswept lashes I recognise Gabriel, Uriel and Barachiel on Ryan’s side of the room; Jeremiel, K’el and Michael on Luc’s side.
Something seems to leap in me when I see them all, gathered together. My people, my brethren, once like brothers to me.
I can actually see them. I am permitted to gaze upon them. For now, I am part of their world again.
Gabriel inclines his head at me in greeting, while Uriel scowls — exactly the way I would. Barachiel’s face is expressionless, as I knew it would be given our history together; we were always too alike for comfort. Jeremiel regards me steadily with his silver gaze. K’el looks down, away from me, and Michael’s black gaze seems to burn holes in the very air between us.
But something’s wrong. Raphael and Selaphiel I knew to be missing, but where is Jegudiel?
K’el is a stand-in for the missing, I realise suddenly, but he’s nowhere near as powerful as any of the Eight.
And Nuriel?
What has Luc done to her?
As I sweep onto the platform, into that space between them all, time stands still. Time, and the world, and everything in it.
‘You’re too late,’ Luc says smoothly, standing suddenly and turning towards Michael behind him.
Gudrun rises with him. Her hand is on his arm, his hand over hers protectively. My eyes narrow as I see something that hadn’t been apparent to me until now. They’re a couple. They’re actually together.
That roaring returns, that darkness rises in me, and for a moment I feel again as if I’ve lost my hold on the physical world. I have no place, no centre, no anchor. I am rage, I am pain. I’m freefalling.
I step towards Luc, swept by a sudden, incandescent fury at his betrayal. I throw the corny bridal bouquet at the back of his head and it disappears, turned to ash as it touches him. It’s such a mortal, puny gesture. I have no weaponry. I’m defenceless against my anguish.
‘How could you?’ I shriek, and he turns. ‘You just … replaced me? When? When did this happen? Recently? Or the second I was exiled?’
I don’t catch them moving, but Jeremiel, K’el and Michael are suddenly closer to us, moving through the still forms of all the humans now frozen, mid-whistle, mid-applause, like mannequins themselves. I’m sure that, behind me, Gabriel, Uriel and Barachiel have done the same, started closing that shark net in which I am the live bait.
They were never going to shift me first, I realise suddenly. They were always going to wait until they’d drawn Luc here. That, too, makes me furious — to be used in such a way.
Something dangerous flashes in his ice-blue eyes. ‘I don’t need to explain myself to you,’ Luc snarls at me. ‘When you left, you took everything from me; you ruined my life in that instant. Everything changed. Because of you, I’ve been trapped on this earth, caged like an animal, for centuries. Gudrun has made the intervening age,’ he spits the word, ‘significantly less of a trial.’
Gudrun looks up at me with open hostility in her bright, sapphire eyes and I recoil as Luc pulls her closer. They’re so obviously made for each other, such a matched set, that I wonder how he ever could have thought I was the one. Does he love and desire her the way he claimed to have loved and desired me?
For a moment, I’m so disoriented I stumble and almost fall.
I look nothing like her. I have none of the easy charm she displays around people. She’s my opposite in almost every way. Compliant. Womanly. So clearly not Luc’s equal, and nor does she strive to be.
And she’s no archangel, I realise suddenly, despite her luminous beauty. She might have been, once. But no longer. Not for a long time. But what is she now?
Gudrun places one hand on the fussy silk bow at the throat of her high-necked blouse and actually growls at me. Like a panther. I rock back on my heels, my horror etched on my face.
‘I warned you,’ Gabriel interjects, his voice steely. ‘You have little idea of how much your “beloved” has changed. He is not the one you remember. Stand aside, Mercy. Let it all end here. Let us deal with Luc as he should be dealt with. And when it is done, you will be free to go where you wish, be who you wish. We will no longer have any claim over you and you will no longer pose a threat to the order of anything, anywhere.’
When I stand there, still transfixed with shame and fury and envy by the sight of Luc with the bombshell he replaced me with, Gabriel says more gently, ‘Soror.’ Sister. I look down at him.
‘Turn away. Cover your eyes. And when we are done and gone, get that boy safely home.’
Gabriel raises his hand and I turn to follow it, and see Ryan, his seated, frozen form, his eyes fixed on the empty air where I’d been standing only seconds before. There’s that look in his eyes. Of love. For me. Captured there for all to witness.
Horror rises up in me again. Gabriel’s right. Ryan will always be vulnerable to those of our kind who wish him harm. I need to get him out of here.
I nod to show that I’ve understood, and back away from Luc’s achingly familiar, achingly beautiful form, all my dreams of him, of home, of our secret garden, like ashes now, too.
‘That’s it?’ Luc throws back his head and laughs. ‘You think I’m afraid of you six? K’el is no substitute for the great Raphael — who was not easy to subdue, I’ll admit. He’s no substitute even for that weakling Selaphiel. As for Nuriel? We have her, and we’ll keep her for as long as we deem it necessary. She’s not particularly … comfortable, but she’s still alive. If barely.’
I see Gabriel and Uriel exchange worried glances.
Luc laughs again, and his voice has a ringing, grating edge to it that makes me want to clap my hands over my ears in pain. ‘Which means you stay exactly where you are, Mercy. You and I are nowhere near finished.’
I can’t summon any words of defiance. Truly, all I have left are feelings. While I somehow manage to find the strength to hold Luc’s gaze, I am being slowly torn apart inside, as if by wolves.
I feel Gabriel leap lightly onto the platform beside me. He places a strong hand upon my back, and from it flows the strength to defy the one whom I would have died for. Years ago, aeons.
‘We are finished,’ I tell Luc bitterly. ‘I don’t recognise you, and I don’t want to know who you’ve become. I’ve wasted enough time holding out hope that we’d be together again, the way we used to be. This is the point where I get out of the frame, at long last. You disgust me.’
I’m turning away from him, from them all, when Luc suddenly calls out my name. My true name. And I wrap my arms around my head in agony.
It’s like I’m the only still point in a spinning, screaming world, and I fall to my knees, sweating and shaking, my own name a weapon of absolute control.
As I fall forward onto the runway — deaf and blind to everything except the shattering noises in my head — the entire room comes alive around us.
It only takes seconds for people to register the eight shining beings gathered around my prone form on the catwalk, growing in stature right before our eyes, becoming giants until they tower over everyone present. Become less and less human. More and more luminous, more beautiful. Grow wings.
Then swords of pure flame ignite in their hands, crackling with energy, and the air around me begins to superheat as six move to contain two.
People begin to shriek and scramble backwards, away from us. I sit up slowly on the runway, head pounding
Luc raises one hand casually and the vast space is suddenly plunged into a terrible darkness in which the only visible things are the eight beings surrounding me.
One by one the video screens go up in flames along the length of the arcade, so that those who have not already made it to the southern exit turn and flee for the east–west axis of the cross-shaped building, screaming in terror, trampling others in their desperation to flee the flames.
The darkness is lit by fire, by the screens of mobile phones, by eerie flashes of lightning from above. Around us is utter chaos; the theory of that man Darwin in motion.
‘Mercy!’ I hear Ryan shouting somewhere behind me. ‘Mercy! Where are you?’
I turn to look for him, but all the chairs have been swept aside. There are bodies everywhere, people pushing and buffeting each other. The smell of burning plastic and circuitry is intense and acrid.
‘We have no quarrel with you,’ I hear Barachiel say to Gudrun as she edges towards me, as if for safety. ‘Stand aside from him and you get to live.’
K’el, Jeremiel, Uriel and Gabriel close in around Luc’s golden, watchful form.
Michael turns his head of short, black curls in my direction, fury in his black eyes and raises his blazing blade. ‘Flee,’ he roars at me, at Gudrun. ‘You will have little stomach for what we are about to do to the one you each call your beloved.’
‘Kneel,’ he bellows at Luc, judgment in his bell-like voice. ‘Submit. There is no one left to pray to. He turned from you when you turned from Him. I should have finished you properly the first time.’
The six close their circle around Luc, intending to sacrifice him here, before us all.
Through the screams of the injured and terrified, I hear Ryan again. ‘Mercy! Mercy! Tell me you’re still here.’
I swing my head in his direction, shouting, ‘Ryan! Yes, I’m here. I’m still here. Don’t move — I’m —’
Then Luc does it again. He roars my name and I’m as good as dead. Bent double in agony, I can’t hear, can’t see, can’t speak. All because Raphael once thought it a good idea to hide the memory of my name inside me, so deep that I can’t recognise it, or bear to hear it, without going haywire.
Gudrun seizes me by the throat then, lifting my mortal form easily off the ground.
Michael frowns; the other five exchange glances. But their watchful stances never vary. They are here for Luc first and foremost.
‘Let her die,’ Michael says dismissively, turning away from Gudrun, from me. ‘At heart, she’s one of you anyway. Do your worst, demon.’
Demon? Is that what she is?
Is that what Michael and the others really think of me?
I am filled with so much rage and shock and hurt, that my clenched left fist begins to blaze in agony and I kick out, almost breaking free of Gudrun’s imprisoning hold. She digs the fingers of her right hand harder into the flesh of Irina’s throat as Michael and Luc circle around us slowly, blades raised and rippling with a pale blue luminescence.
As I struggle to get air into Irina’s lungs, to stay conscious, Michael’s black eyes clash briefly with mine before they slide away. My shock deepens when I realise that he’s doing this deliberately. He’s actually trying to provoke me, and somehow, just for a moment, I could divine his intent. Anger can be used; it can be channelled, his gaze seemed to say. There must be no surrender. The realisation only makes me struggle harder, though my eyes are failing, and my movements are growing feeble and unfocused.
Luc’s voice is amused. ‘Still haven’t worked it all out yet, my love? You didn’t used to be so slow.’
Lightning splits the sky above the Galleria again and I see Ryan gripping the edge of the catwalk about ten feet away to my left, people pushing and shoving past him like a living tide. His own eyes widen in shock when he sees Irina dangling like a doll in a bride’s dress and crumpled wings at the end of Gudrun’s arm.
The others don’t see Ryan vault up onto the runway, staying low. And I can’t warn him to keep away, not to try anything heroic, because Gudrun’s crushing my windpipe in her right hand, the nails blood red.
Flames suddenly burst up the sides of the runway and Ryan dives out of view. At the edges of my sight, I see the hysteria worsen as people are hemmed in by flames on all sides. They change direction multiple times, like a stampeding herd. People go down and stay down, lie still.
‘Don’t you understand?’ Luc says calmly, facing down the tip of Michael’s flaming broadsword without flinching. ‘My trap is sprung within yours. It has already closed around you all — most holy, most high.’ He throws his golden head back and laughs. ‘It is you who must kneel. I have a special vengeance reserved for all of you; but for you, Michael, I have something truly exceptional in mind.’
Luc raises his blazing blade aloft and light seeps up out of the mosaic floor in multiple locations, twines swiftly around the ankles of all the people pushing desperately for the exits, slides over the still bodies of the prone, before coalescing into shining shapes that move rapidly towards the catwalk and rise unscathed through fire. They gather upon the catwalk, a shining army, a score of them at least. All beautiful, all tall, all lethal. They must be part of Luc’s personal guard; the most fearsome of his legion: his daemonium.
They are winged as the archangels are — for that is what they once must have been. And they are still indistinguishable from us, save that most are in shining raiment that is high-necked or long-sleeved. Not for them, the glowing, sleeveless raiment of the six archangels they now surround. They are truly our opposite, in attitude and appetite.
Swords ignite in their hands as they fall upon Michael, upon Barachiel, Jeremiel, Gabriel, Uriel, until their shining forms are engulfed. I hear the sizzle as blade meets blade, and the air is a whirl of limbs, wings, ambient light.
K’el, the weakest of the six, is engaged by five of Luc’s forces at once, and immediately takes to the air, trying to shake them off. Uriel, too, suddenly ascends — as if he would protect K’el — parrying the blades of the two beings that harry him, one from each side.
People scream and point upwards as they flee.
I kick and twist within the grip of Gudrun’s crushing fist but she is like a creature of legend, a stone giantess. Darkness invades my sight once more as Irina’s body begins to suffocate, to die.
Luc turns to Gudrun and gives her the kind of smile that once would have brought me to my knees with love.
‘Give her to me,’ he says. ‘Alive or dead, I still have use for her. The moment is upon us, my dear. It begins tonight.’
Gudrun throws me down onto the catwalk, and I suck greedily at the tainted air, searching through the smoke and flames and darkness for Ryan. But he’s nowhere to be seen.
Luc’s sword vanishes into the palm of his hand and he crosses the short distance to me, looks down upon my bowed, human head.
‘I told you something once — in a fit of love-struck madness,’ he says. ‘Do you remember it?’
I close my eyes briefly and nod, remembering the two of us entwined in our secret garden, the air heavy with the scent of a thousand different blooms that no human hand could possibly have put together.
You are the best and most loved thing in my life — let nothing ever be possible, or complete, if you are not with me. And may the elements witness my vow in all their silent glory.
My eyes sting in remembrance. How happy I’d been then. I hadn’t known that happiness would be denied me, all the years thereafter.
‘That was my undoing,’ he whispers. ‘My vow was witnessed, and it has dogged me all of my days upon this earth. It is the supreme irony that without you, I am nothing. I have power, but only so much; a kingdom, but such a poor, mean kingdom with no hope of expansion or conquest. Until now. Now, your soul is mine again. And it shall free me.’
I recoil at his words as if I’ve been spat upon. He speaks of kingdoms and conquests when all the universe was once ours to play in. What happ
Luc raises me up with one gleaming hand, and I am forced to look into his eyes, so far above me, that are so pale, so glorious, and yet contain so much darkness. I never saw that darkness when he appeared to me in my dreams. He is indeed a liar of talent, the best there ever was.
‘Tonight,’ he murmurs, ‘I begin the reclamation of what I have lost. And you shall witness me bring the kingdoms of earth and of Heaven to their knees, so that I may be God at last, over all.’
He places the heel of one shining hand upon my forehead and I am transfixed by his touch, as if by a live current. I can neither breathe nor struggle, though my mouth is stretched wide in a silent scream.
My left hand ignites. It bursts into a searing white flame that is as coruscating as it is beautiful.
And all around me, I see an answering flame — shining from Luc, from Gudrun, from all of his winged warriors, his daemonium.
Each of them bears a glowing wound that is suddenly visible beneath the long-sleeved, high-necked raiment that they wear. Some bear scars at the base of the throat — as Gudrun does — some upon the shoulder, the centre of the back. Many are scarred upon their forearms, or their upper arms. Some bear one scar, others two.
Even Luc bears a glowing scar right in the centre of his broad chest, visible beneath the human clothing he has assumed. The size of an archangel’s handprint.
They are all marked, as I am.
In some way, they are all exiles, too.
But there is no time to ponder the mystery. The pain of Luc’s touch is excruciating — it’s as if my soul is being destroyed, or transfigured.
His touch reaches down into Irina’s skull, into her flesh and bones, the very matter of which she’s made. He’s drawing me out, coil by resistant coil. He’s following the switchbacks and false trails, the broken pattern that I’ve somehow been cast into. He is irradiating me with his fire, seeking to remake me, remould me.
And I see, I see —
— that final, fatal moment in which Luc and I were the epicentre of something vast, a conflagration waiting to happen, an ache in time, a breath suspended. The Eight arrayed against us, weapons of power raised, a shining multitude gathered behind them. Behind Luc and me, another shining multitude. Two halves of a people that had once been whole and united.