The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 399: Heavenfall

Chapter 399: Heavenfall

Cassiel struggled to right herself as another impact caused the world to shudder and tilt around her, clutching the precious coil of golden wire to her side.

For three days Araqlun had languished.

On the first day, all had seemed fine in the city.

The Council of Choirs had been assassinated, but the Son of Heaven had promised stability and a quick solution. He ruled now, unopposed, because there was no time for proper procedures when all of Heaven was at stake.

Power was restored to the city. The ancient shields were holding against the vacuum. The rest of Heaven might have been floating away but the city was whole.

He would find a way to bring everything back.

Then the power outages started.

On the second day, people panicked.

The portal network was down. Had been down, and no one had been told, much less allowed to try to use it, since the crisis started.

Not since that blasphemous day had any strong Perditions formed to link Heaven to anywhere. The few weak ones all led to Hell, and were snapped up in an instant by those who discovered them.

Riots broke out as the Choirless began to seek asylum. Anyone with ties tried to join a Choir or the Executioners. Anyone without ties lied, cheated, and stole to get what they thought they would need.

When the gravity disappeared, some desperate mages formed circles of magic, breaching the city shields where they could and trying to fly the gap between Heaven and Ayther...

Today, Cassiel tried to keep her eyes off one such knot of fools as she unspooled the golden wire behind her, flapping from the Capitol to the Black Tower. Even as she passed her colleagues, whenever she blinked, she saw the frozen faces of angels, arms and wings akimbo and tangled in equal measure.

Did they suffocate or freeze?

One thing was certain, magic could not preserve someone against the void for long.

Some angels glared at her as she wound her way to the hollow elevator shaft and began to draw the spool downward.

She was not the only survivor of the battle, but she was the only one from the Capitol to come out of it without wounds - at least in the eyes of her peers, once Auriciel spewed his jealous vitriol at her. He’d lost his wings. Whereas Cassiel came to with a mere scar over her heart; a thin cats-eye growth consistent with the sword of a rakish-looking demonkin whose eyes held nothing but contempt -

No! Don’t think. Just work. We have to survive this. She forced her body to relax, focusing on staying in the middle of the passage to avoid collisions.

Forty floors down, she arrived, pulling hard to get the last bit of length as she saw Vinam with his hand on Auric’s shoulder.

All over the place, cables and wires and open panels littered what had once been a place of harsh precision and absolute order. She tried not to look at the walls once she got into the "power room." Or at least to not look up, because where the smoothness ended, the horror began.

She hadn’t known this place existed, except from the vagaries of learning the city’s true power uses a lifetime ago with Rain.

For the last three days, she’d spent every waking hour working. She’d already passed the limits of using her hekatonkheires, so she used her hands for this final stretch. This final task that promised survival...

Stealing a glance at Auric, she saw suffering on his face. His wings had been replaced with godflesh, rather than being regenerated. Whatever Vinam was saying to him, the youth nodded along.

It went without saying that their relationship was over.

Executioner Elevated and angels surrounded them with recording equipment. The very image of a touching moment between uncle and nephew.

But Cassiel knew the truth. Auric would be sacrificed because of her mistake.

That’s why she was down here. That’s why, when Auric descended upon her, furious from his defeat, she bowed and scraped her head on the floor and vowed that she would serve - even beyond the death of Maledict...

Anything to survive long enough to get answers from Rain.

Vinam made it an Oath, and the mark of it wrapped around her neck.

Cass handed off the gold cable to an Executioner and received a distrustful grunt.

An angel - not an Executioner, but an engineer - gave her directions.

Plug this.

Weld that.

Bring that wire over here.

The hours passed in a fugue of activity.

And then...

An omnipresent hum began when the Black Tower finally gave back some of its enormous power draw to Araqlun.

"The Lance is shut down," the engineer said, his face and arms a mess of substances Cassiel could not identify. "Might be rough getting it back up again, but we won’t die for a few weeks yet."

"And you’re sure it will take the new... interface?" Vinam asked, his eyes flickering over to Auric.

"Won’t know until we try. One shot at minimum power and full spread, might produce enough thrust to get us to Hell in a week. After that, it’s diminishing returns." He scratched his elbow. "Are you sure you want to do this? The Marionette System’s already proved unreliable..."

"Just do your job." Vinam hissed. "My nephew has already bravely agreed..."

What are they talking about? Cassiel wondered, her mind returning to the horror of the face that had been grafted over Rainier’s. Its wrongness matched the wrongness of this room.

Again, she tried not to look up past the walls.

It’s just a little compromise... Heaven has always been this way, she told herself.

She just didn’t know it. She’d wanted things to be better - for herself, mostly - but had no idea how bad things had actually been...

CLAP.

The sudden sound jerked Cassiel’s attention to the center of the room, where Vinam had his hands together. Auric stood behind him, on a circular floorplate made of gold.

"Everyone, please, to the entrance. We are ready to get started," Vinam smiled, his face and wings slightly haggard after days without grooming. Oddly, Cassiel felt the High Seraphim looked like a leader for the first time.

Everyone but the media crew stepped away. Cassiel joined them, guessing that they would be called on only if something went wrong. Vinam’s advisors were the last to step away.

As the High Seraphim cleared his throat and warmed up, Cassiel felt a disjointed sense of reality. The face of Vinam that was being put on was a confident, powerful angel. But she remembered a different face— the face of the angel with his sword at her throat, demanding absolute fealty; demanding she be more useful than Auric.

The face of defeat and desperation felt more true than the face she saw on her tablet as she opened it to watch the speech properly.

How could Vinam so quickly discard what happened?

"Oh ye angels, hear me. Heaven is wounded..."

Was that simply the difference between leaders and followers? Or something else? Rain had always thought of Vinam as something like an opportunist with something to hide. Even when they had a relationship, Cassiel tried to see more in Heaven’s leadership than him, but she couldn’t help but feel in this moment that there had been something to his words...

No. Rain is a traitor. My role now is to bring him down, not entertain his... treasonous whinging. My role is to obey the Son of Heaven.

She missed the opening to Vinam’s speech.

"... is to deny reality. And the reality is, we were betrayed!"

On her tablet, Rainier’s form was brought into view. The image was grainy, and the grafted face of Helios unidentifiable, but from the angle it was clearly from an Executioner’s halo camera.

"This mortal with darkness in his heart brought Hell itself into our very homes. With lies... deceptions... even to those he claimed friendship and fealty to, he brought Heresy amongst us..." Vinam brought both hands to his face, passing his fingers through his crimson hair, affecting a quiver in his voice - of barely contained wrath. "But I cannot blame him alone... not when we know all mortals possess this seed. That is why we elevate the good ones... that is why we make them better than they were."

Cassiel nodded, finding she agreed despite knowing how passively Heaven truly regarded the Elevated, at least until now.

"It is my fault... that I did not identify this seed of evil amongst us. As leader of the Executioners, I was beholden to know all under my wings, and I failed you. And for that, I shall take on the burden of revealing the truth. And committing Heaven to the role which we should have taken long ago." Looking askance, Vinam nodded.

A mechanical whirr began, and the golden platform with Auric on it rose towards the ceiling. And even staring into her tablet, Cassiel could not escape the horror of those soundless faces. Those grasping arms and twitching legs. The eyes, the teeth, the wings, the fingernails...

White and gold.

A single, pulsating mass of godflesh. Countless mortals who had stretched their hands into immortality, and who had been punished for their hubris - or so Vinam’s tale went as he spun the story out to explain the horror above himself. The Truth of Heaven: A prison of undying souls... albeit powerful ones, whose mana could give angels every luxury.

Auric was drawn upward, unresisting as he was pulled into the center, his wings swaddling him as they snapped and crumpled. Godflesh merged with its own kind, and Auric’s eyes blazed with golden power. As his inside lit up and he screamed soundlessly behind the barrier that had been erected so people could work in this forbidden place.

"My precious nephew gives himself freely now... and his sacrifice will not be in vain." Blessedly, the images shifted, showing the gaping grey maw of a massive Perdition in space. "Through him, Heaven shall move. He will bring us close to this Perdition... and as projected, it will be enough to bring Araqlun to Ayther..." Relief sounded in the room, and Cassiel felt hope rise in her chest. "But it is clear now that the greater duty lies ahead. The seed of evil cannot be allowed to persist in mortals." Anger rose in the room along with Vinam’s voice.

"We have been patient and kind and suffered their heresies long enough! When Heaven arrives, it is time to purify Ayther! It is time to show the world the true meaning of ’Heaven over all!’" He raised his hand, drawing forth a lance of pure mana. "We will show them, that Heaven is Eternal!"

"Heaven Eternal!" a shout responded.

"Heaven Eternal!" "Heaven Eternal!" Everyone bellowed. Cried. Frothed at the lips to pledge themselves to the cause of purification.

The Black Tower seemed to quake with their resolve.

And when Vinam looked her way, Cassiel added her voice.

"Heaven Eternal!" she saluted, wishing she felt it were so.