The Long Red Road

Book One of the Crown Eternal

by Emil Landron

— a memoir of the descent, as told by the one who climbed back out

This book is dedicated to my daughter, Amira.

Prologue: The Gate

I will tell this the way I lived it. I owe that to the dead, who will not have the chance to correct me.

It began on the white wall of the City. My brother saw them first — he always saw further than I did, that was the gift the first morning of the world had given him — and he came up the stair in his quiet way and said only, “Eight, brother. Coming up.” And I knew, because we had known since before the host had a name, what eight meant.

Pride. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth. The seven Sins. And leading them — Death, their captain, the one whose name we did not say without cause.

We went down to the gate together. The two of us, the way it had always been. He on my left, where he had always been. We did not call the host. There was no time. We had been forged for this hour, the two of us, and the host had not been, and a blade does not consult the body before it cuts.

The Sins were already on the slope when we opened the gate. They had not come alone — there were things with them, lesser things, numerous and wrong, the kind of creatures that crawl up out of deep places when something large moves through. I did not look at them long. They were not what mattered.

I want to tell you about that fight, but I cannot, because I do not remember it well. It was the first hour of the last war and I was not yet the thing I would become; I was still the brighter version of myself, and somehow the lesser, the one who thought a battle was a thing you could win. I remember swinging. I remember the white stone of the slope going red. I remember Pride’s gold face turning toward me in surprise — and my sword finding the jaw beneath it — and Wrath’s two swords coming down where I had been a moment before. I remember the host on the wall above us, finally — finally — beginning to sound the trumpets, and I remember the sound of a thousand wings opening behind me, and I remember thinking, with a wild small relief, it is going to be all right.

It was not all right. But one thing went right, on that slope, and I will tell it because it matters later.

I killed Sloth.

He was the slowest of them — that was his nature, his gift and his curse. He was vast and heavy and he moved the way stone moves, and on the slope of Heaven, in the open, with no domain to shelter him, he was slow. I came at him from the side while he was still turning to face the host, and I put my sword through his throat, and he fell on the white stone like a hill collapsing, and the sound of him hitting the ground was the sound that made the others look.

They saw him fall. They saw one of their own die on the slope of Heaven, in the open air, with no domain to save him. And I think — I have thought about it since — that is the moment they understood what they were. Outside their domains, they were mortal. They could be cut. They could be killed. And the host was coming down behind us.

That is why they ran.

The Sins broke. The six that remained turned on the white stone, and Death with them, and they fled back down the slope, into the dusk, and from the dusk into the dark, and from the dark into the long red road that goes down — down past the foundations of the world, down into the deep places where the light has never reached, down into Hell.

My brother found me in the aftermath. On the wall above, the host was singing. On the slope below, our soldiers were still finishing the lesser things that had not run. The City was safe. The gate had held.

He was not wounded. He was whole and standing and his face had that quiet, watchful look — the eyes the color of sky before storm — and he took my arm and said, in a voice only I could hear:

“Brother. They are running. They will heal. In the deep places, they will heal. They will come back. They will come back stronger and they will bring more with them next time. We must follow them. We must go down and finish it while they are still bleeding.”

“The host—”

“The host will follow. But they are still fighting what the Sins left on the slope — the lesser things, the ones that do not know how to stop. By the time they finish and muster, the Sins will have healed.” He was looking at me with that quiet face. “We go first, brother. The two of us, the way it has always been. We are the first wave. We take a squad — twelve, no more, enough to move fast — and we go down while the road is still fresh behind them. The host musters and follows. By the time they reach the deep places, we will have finished it.”

I hesitated. He saw it.

“You have not seen what they are in their own domain, brother.” His voice was low now, urgent. “You killed Sloth on the slope, yes. But Sloth was outside his domain — slow, exposed, mortal. The rest will not make that mistake. In the deep places, the domain is theirs — they are the air, the stone, the law of the place. They will be stronger there than anything you have fought. If we give them time to settle back into their domains, if we let them heal and harden in the places they have built for themselves — we will not be able to dig them out. Not with the host. Not with anything.”

I looked at him. He was right. He was always right. We had always been the first wave — the two of us at the tip of the spear, the host behind us. That was what we had been forged for.

So we went to find twelve.

I will tell you their names, in a moment. I owe them that.

But first I want you to understand the shape of what I did, because it is the shape that mattered, in the end. I took twelve of the host — twelve ordinary soldiers, twelve angels who had names and friends and small quiet lives behind the walls of the City — and I walked them down the slope into the dusk with my brother at my side, and I did not look back.

He had told me not to.

He was always, always, the one who saw further than I did.

Chapter One: The Twelve

I will give you the ones who stood closest first. The rest — I will tell you about them as the road tells me, because some people do not show you who they are until the dark comes.

Ithuriel was my second. He was not old, as the host counts old — perhaps five thousand years, no more — but he had a weight to him that older angels did not always have. He was the best swordsman in the lower ranks, and everyone knew it, and he carried that knowing the way a man carries a tool he has not yet been asked to use. He came to me at the gate without my asking and said only, “I am with you, brother.” I almost told him not to call me that. I did not. I was glad of it.

Sariel was the youngest. He was barely a thousand years old and he should not have come. I told him so. He grinned at me — he had the brightest grin, Sariel, you would have liked him — and he said, “My lord, if you leave me here I will only follow you. Take me, and at least I will be in front of you when I die.” I took him.

Ezekiel carried the standard. He was old for a soldier of his rank — old and patient and overlooked, the kind of angel who had served longer than anyone remembered and never been promoted because he never asked. He asked, when I told him where we were going, only one question: “Will we come back?” I told him I did not know. He nodded as though I had told him the weather.

Tamael had led a squad in the lower wars — not a captain, not quite, but a sergeant who had held the line when captains fell. He was the one who chose most of the rest. He stood at the gate with his arms crossed and he watched the host go past, and as they filed by he tapped certain of them on the shoulder — one here, one there, choosing by some instinct I did not question — and each one he chose stepped out of the line and came to stand with us, and not one of them asked why.

Nuriel came last. She was a healer — young, quiet, with steady hands and a bag of knives she kept sharper than most soldiers kept their swords. She came because Sariel asked her to. I saw him go to her in the crowd and I saw him take her hand and I saw her face change, and then she was with us, and she did not look at Sariel again until the counting house. That was theirs. I will not say more about it.

Gadiel was solid. Quiet, dependable, the kind of soldier who never spoke up in briefings and always did exactly what he was told. He was the one you put on your flank and forgot about, because he would be there.

There were six more. Tamael chose them and I trusted his choosing. I will tell you their names now — Phanuel, Lariel, Zuriel, Remiel, Anael, Camael — and I will tell you about each of them when the road shows them to you, because that is how I came to know them too. Not from a list. From the dark.

They were not captains. They were not commanders. They were not the great warriors of the host whose names are sung in the high halls. They were soldiers — ordinary, brave, breakable in all the ways that matter — and I took them into Hell, and most of them did not come back, and I owe them more than I will ever be able to write.

And my brother. He walked beside me, on my left, where he had always been. Hell took him too.

The dusk at the foot of the slope thickened as we walked into it. The light of Heaven thinned behind us. The twelve walked behind us, and for a while the only sound was our boots on the red road and the fading song of the host above.

After a long while — I do not know how long, time worked strangely on the road — Ezekiel turned and looked back, and I turned with him, and we saw the white wall of the City for the last time before it disappeared into the gold haze above us.

I made a small private vow then — not to my brother, not to the host, but to the twelve behind me — that I would bring them back to that wall. All of them. Every one.

The road went down.

Chapter Two: The Gates

And then we reached the gates of Hell.

They were not what I expected. They were not black iron, not fire, not screaming. They were stone. Old stone, older than the City, older than the host, carved with faces I did not recognize — faces that had been here before any of us, before the light, before the first morning of the world. The gates were open. The Sins had passed through them and left them wide, and beyond them the road went down into a dark that was not dark so much as it was heavy, a dark that pressed against the eyes.

Phanuel stopped at the threshold. She did it the way she did everything — quietly, without asking permission — and she knelt on the red stone and said one of the old prayers, the kind the first angels used to say before crossing dark water. I did not know the words. She did. She said them quickly, her lips barely moving, and then she stood and walked through, and did not look back.

I would learn, further down the road, that she prayed at every threshold. Before every door, every gate, every crossing from one domain to the next. Small prayers, quiet ones. I did not know, then, that I would hear her last prayer cut in half.

We walked through.

And behind us — I heard it, we all heard it — the gates began to close.

I turned. The great stone doors were swinging shut, slowly, with a sound like the earth settling. Lariel was nearest — she lunged for the gap, trying to hold them, but the stone did not care about her hands. The gates closed. The sound of them meeting was not loud. It was final.

“The road back is shut,” my brother said quietly. He was looking at the gates with an expression I could not read. “Hell does not let go of what walks in.”

“Then the host cannot follow us,” Tamael said.

“No.” My brother turned from the gates. His face was calm. “We are alone now, brother. The fourteen of us and the road ahead. Whatever is down there, we finish it ourselves.”

I looked at him. He was so calm. He was always so calm.

“Then we go forward,” I said.

He smiled — that small, tired smile of his — and he said, “Forward.”

We had gone perhaps a hundred paces into the heavy dark when my brother stumbled.

I heard him catch his breath — a small, sharp sound, the kind of sound he never made — and I turned, and he was on one knee with his hand pressed to his side, and there was blood between his fingers.

“Brother—”

“It is nothing.” But his voice was thin. “One of them — on the slope — I did not feel it until now. The cold down here must have—” He stopped. He looked at his hand. The blood was the only color in the dark.

Nuriel was already beside him, her healer’s hands on the wound. She looked up at me and said, “It is deep, my lord. Not mortal, but deep. He needs rest. He cannot fight like this.”

My brother looked at me. That quiet, watchful face. “Go on,” he said. “The wound will heal. It is not mortal — you heard her. I will rest here, and by the time the host breaks through those gates, I will be on my feet. I will join them. I will come down the road behind you with the full strength of Heaven at my back.” He almost smiled. “You are the first wave, brother. You have always been the first wave. Go. I will be the second.”

“I will not leave you.”

“You will.” His hand on my wrist. His grip was the grip of a child. “You will, brother. The Sins are bleeding now. If you wait for me to heal, if you wait for the host — they will be strong again by the time you reach them. Go now. Finish it while they are still weak. I will find you. I will find you.“

I looked at Nuriel. “Stay with him. Heal him.”

“No.” My brother’s voice was sharp — the first time he had raised it. “No, brother. You will need her more than I will. The wound will close on its own. It only needs time. Take the healer. Take all of them. You are going into the deep places and you will need every blade and every pair of hands you can carry.”

I looked at him. He was so pale. The blood was still coming. And he was sending the healer away — because he wanted me to have every advantage, because he was thinking of me even now, even bleeding on the threshold of Hell.

I am going to tell you something that I have never told anyone, and that I have spent a long time not telling myself.

I did not want to go.

I did not want to leave him. I wanted to sit on the cold stone of Hell’s threshold and hold his hand and let Nuriel do her work and watch his color come back and feel, once and for all, that the war was over. I wanted to be tired. I wanted to be done. I had been forged for war and I had won my war and I wanted, for the first time in all my long existence, to rest.

But he was looking at me with that quiet face. And he was right. He was always right.

So I bent down and I pressed my forehead to his forehead, the way we had done when we were both very young in the high meadows above the City, and I made him a promise I will not write down, and then I stood up and I turned to the twelve.

They were watching me. Twelve faces in the heavy dark. Waiting.

“He stays,” I said. “We go.”

Not one of them argued. Not one of them asked if we should wait. They trusted me the way soldiers trust — not because I had earned it yet, but because someone had to be trusted, and I was the one in front.

I turned my back on my brother and I walked down the road into the dark, with twelve at my heels, and I did not look back.

Remiel was the first to mark the way. He knelt at the base of the closed doors — I did not see him do it, Tamael told me later — and he scratched something into the stone with a small sharp piece of white quartz he carried in his belt. An arrow. Pointing back the way we had come. I asked him about it later, on the road, and he said, very seriously, “Making sure we can find the way home, my lord.” He would draw one at every layer we passed through. I would not understand until later why that mattered so much, or what it cost him.

We walked in the dark for a long time. The road went down and the silence was heavy and after a while I became aware of a sound I had not noticed starting — a low, steady humming, under the breath, in the dark behind me. It was Lariel. She was singing one of the old walking songs, the ones soldiers hum to keep their feet in time on a long march. She sang quietly, so quietly that after a while you stopped noticing it as a song and started hearing it as a heartbeat — the squad’s heartbeat, steady and low, keeping us all in step. Sariel fell in beside her. Then Zuriel. Then the rest. By the time the first light of the first domain appeared below us, the whole squad was walking in time, and the song was the only thing holding us together.

He had asked me not to.

He was always, always, the one who saw further than I did.

Chapter Three: Pride

The first layer of Hell was not what I expected.

I had been told stories of Hell since the first morning of the world. I had been told of fire, and of weeping, and of great wheels of black iron turning forever over pits of screaming. None of that was true of the first layer. The first layer of Hell was beautiful.

It was a city. A vast, gleaming city, stretching to a horizon that should not have existed — towers of polished bronze and white marble, streets paved in lapis, fountains running with something that looked like wine and was not. The light was warm, and golden, and it fell on everything in a way that flattered. Statues of a beautiful tall figure stood at every intersection. The figure had a face of beaten gold and arms upraised in benediction.

Pride had built himself a heaven, down in the dark, and he had built it to be more beautiful than ours.

We walked into it slowly. Ezekiel was carrying the standard and his face had gone very still. Sariel was looking up at the towers with his bright grin gone, his mouth open a little, like a child counting too high. Ithuriel walked beside me and his hand never left his sword.

“My lord,” Tamael said quietly. “I do not like this.”

I did not like it either. There was no one in the streets. The city was empty, and beautiful, and waiting, and after a while I understood what it was waiting for, and I understood that I had walked us all into the heart of it.

It was waiting for us to look up.

Pride was on the highest tower. He was perhaps a hundred times the size he had been on the slope above. His gold face filled the sky. He looked down at us — small things on the lapis streets, twelve and one — and he smiled, and his smile was the size of a thunderhead, and he said, in a voice that came from every statue in the city at once:

“You should not have come down here, little blade. On the slope, we were guests in your house. You fought us on your ground, in your light, with your host behind you. But you have followed us home. This is my domain. Do you know what we do here, to a guest who follows us home?”

I did not answer. I could not. The voice was pressing down on us like weather. Sariel had gone to his knees. Phanuel was bleeding from the ears.

And Zuriel laughed.

It came out of nowhere — a bright, startled, nervous sound in the crushing gravity of Pride’s voice. I turned to look at her, because I thought, for one wild moment, that she had gone mad. She had not gone mad. She was terrified, and the laughter was the way she kept the terror from becoming something worse. It broke through the pressure the way a crack breaks through ice — not enough to shatter it, but enough to breathe. Tamael looked at her. Ezekiel looked at her. And then, because the sound of someone laughing in the face of a god is either madness or courage, and the squad had decided it was courage, they started getting up.

I would come to rely on that laugh. When Zuriel laughed, it meant we were all still afraid, and being afraid meant we were all still alive.

“We make him kneel,” Pride said. “We make him kneel, and we make him understand, finally, what he is.”

The pressure of his voice forced Ezekiel down. The standard fell.

I will tell you what I learned, in that street, looking up at the gold face that was now the size of a sky. Pride is not what we had thought. Pride is not vanity. Pride is not the small mortal thing that makes a man preen in a glass. Pride is the absolute and total certainty that the universe is arranged around the self — and when a creature like Pride builds his own domain, in the deep places, where there is nothing to contradict him, that certainty becomes real. The streets bent toward him. The light bent toward him. Gravity bent toward him. We were not fighting a being. We were fighting a fact.

Ithuriel was the only one of us still standing. His sword was in his hand. He looked at me sidelong and he said, very quietly:

“Brother. Tell me you have a thought.”

I had a thought.

It was the wrong thought, and it cost us, and I will carry it. But I had it, and I will tell it to you now, because it is the truth.

I said: “His city is the source. Not him. Break the city.”

Ithuriel nodded once. He did a thing then that I will never forget. He turned to Nuriel — Nuriel was on her knees beside Sariel, trying to stop the blood from his ears — and he said, simply, “Look after them.” Then he went up.

You have to understand. Ithuriel could fly. All of us could fly. But Ithuriel went up the way fire goes up — fast, bright, inevitable — and his sword caught the false gold light as he rose out of the lapis street, and he went straight at the gold face on the tower, and Pride saw him coming.

Pride laughed.

He laughed, and the laugh was an earthquake, and the towers around us began to shake. The statues on the corners cracked. The fountains of false wine boiled over. Ithuriel kept climbing. He went up through the laugh as though it were rain, and his sword was steady in his hand, and he struck the gold face once — once — across the cheek.

The face cracked.

Just a hairline. Just a small bright line down the gold, from the eye to the jaw.

But the city heard it. Every statue in every street heard it, because every statue was him, and the cracks ran through them all in the same instant, the same hairline crack down every gold cheek, and the certainty of him faltered, and the gravity that bent toward him let go of us, and we could stand.

I shouted to the squad. They got up. Ezekiel picked up the standard first — of course he did — and then they ran with me, the eleven of them — twelve, still twelve, Ithuriel was still up there fighting — and we did what I had said. We broke the city.

We broke the towers. We broke the statues. We broke the fountains and the lapis streets, and every piece we broke was a piece of him, and the gold face on the highest tower began to scream — and the scream was a small thing, at first, the raw scream of a child, and it grew into the scream of something that had never, in all its long existence, suspected that it could be wounded at all.

He came down off the tower. He came down screaming. He came at Ithuriel.

Ithuriel was waiting for him. He was waiting with his sword drawn and his feet set and his face perfectly calm — the face of a soldier who knows this is the last thing he will do and has decided to do it well — and when Pride reached him he met him in the air and he put his sword through the cracked place in the gold cheek and out the back of the skull, and Pride — the first of them, the one who had stood at the head of them on the slope of Heaven — came apart in the air over his ruined city, came apart in pieces of gold and dust, and was gone.

Ithuriel did not come down.

I want to tell you that he did. I want to tell you that he landed beside me in the broken street and we clasped arms and we mourned and we went on. But he did not come down. Something had caught him as Pride died — I did not see what, none of us saw — a thing in the collapse of the gold light that should not have been there, a blow from behind where no one was standing — and he came down in pieces too, slowly, drifting in the fading light, and Nuriel knelt in the lapis dust and caught what she could of him in her hands.

I have thought about that moment a thousand times since. What struck him from behind. What was in the gold light that I did not see.

We buried him in Pride’s broken city, under the cracked statue of the gold face, and Nuriel did not speak again until the garden.

It was Gadiel who cleared the stones. I did not notice at the time — I was kneeling beside the grave, and the others were standing behind me, and Gadiel was somewhere off to the side with his hands full of broken lapis, quietly making the ground level so we could lay Ithuriel down properly. He did not ask. He did not announce it. He simply saw a thing that needed doing and did it, and when it was done he stepped back to his place on the flank and said nothing. I only know because Ezekiel told me later. I did not notice at the time. That was the thing about Gadiel. You did not notice.

We were twelve.

The road went down.

The road between Pride and Greed was the longest stretch of dark we had walked. No domain, no light, no sound but our boots and Lariel’s song and the small scraping of Remiel’s stone on the wall. I found myself walking beside Anael.

She was checking her hands. I had seen her do this before, in the lower wars — a healer’s habit, testing the steadiness of the fingers, making sure the tools still worked. She had sure hands, Anael. Patient and certain. But I had seen them shake once, a long time ago, in a quiet room, when she told me about the thing she could not fix. They were not shaking now. She saw me looking and she closed her fists and said, simply, “I am all right, my lord.”

Behind us, Camael was carrying Sariel’s pack. No one had asked him to. He had simply picked it up from the place where we laid our dead and put it over his shoulder, and he carried it without comment, and the weight of it — which was not heavy for a man his size — seemed to matter to him in a way I did not understand until the garden.

My brother should have been here. He should have been walking beside me, on my left, where he had always been. The space was empty. I kept drifting toward it, toward the place where he would have stood, and each time I did I felt the absence the way you feel a missing tooth — the tongue goes there, the tongue goes there, the tongue will not stop going there.

I remembered an afternoon. A gold afternoon on the wall, before the Sins, before the war, before any of this. We had been sitting together for a long time without speaking, the way we could, and after a while I had said something — I do not remember what, something small — and he had laughed. Not the quiet laugh he used with the host. A real one. The kind that comes out before you can stop it.

I remember the sound of it. I remember thinking I would hear it again.

The road went down.

Chapter Four: Greed

The second layer was a counting house.

That is the only word I have for it. It went on forever — vast and low-ceilinged and lit by candles that did not burn down — and every surface of it was covered in things. Coins, crowns, jewels, rings, the bright bones of lesser things, broken angelic blades, torn white banners, names torn from the fallen written on slips of paper folded small. Greed had taken everything that had ever been wanted and he had brought it all here, and he was sitting in the middle of it on a chair made of stacked treasure, and he was counting.

He did not look up when we came in.

“One thousand four hundred and twelve,” he said. “One thousand four hundred and thirteen. One thousand four hundred and fourteen. One thousand four hundred and—”

He glanced at us. He went back to counting.

“—and twelve. You and eleven under your command. Eleven. You used to have twelve. Are the rest coming? Should I count for them as well?”

I did not answer him.

“It is no matter,” he said, counting still, his fat gray fingers moving over the coins. “You will be fewer in a moment. Let me get to a round number first. I prefer round numbers.”

This is what Greed does, in his own domain. I want you to understand it, because Sariel did not, and it cost us Sariel.

Greed does not fight you. Greed does not need to fight you. Greed simply owns the space around him, and everything in it, and as you walk into his counting house his ownership reaches out and takes hold of you — small at first, a tug at the cloak, a coin in the pocket you did not have a moment ago — and then more, and then more, and then you find yourself wanting to stay, because there is so much here, and what is one more thing, what is one more, surely you have earned one, surely the road has been so long and so red and you have earned something, brother, just one—

Sariel stopped walking.

I saw him stop. I shouted his name. He did not turn. He had bent down to pick up a coin — a small bright coin, gold, with a face on it I did not recognize — and he was turning it in his fingers, and his bright grin had come back. It was a different grin now. A smaller one. A grin he did not know he was wearing.

“My lord,” he said softly. “My lord, look at this. Look at it. I have never seen one like it. I think I will keep it.”

“Sariel. Drop it. Sariel.“

“Just this one, my lord. Just the one. It would not be missed.”

“Drop it, now, that is an order—”

He looked up at me. And his bright young face — his thousand-year-old face, his barely-grown face, the face of the child who had grinned at me at the gate of Heaven and asked to die in front of me — was not his anymore. The coin had its hand around his heart. He smiled at me, and the smile was Greed’s smile, and he said:

“My lord, surely you would not begrudge me. Surely, after all I have done for you, surely I have earned—”

He did not finish. The coins in the heap behind him — the great heap of treasure on which Greed sat — moved. They moved like water. They poured forward, the whole hill of them, and they came up around Sariel’s ankles, and his knees, and his waist, and Sariel laughed — laughed — because he was being given so much, he was being rewarded, and he raised his arms to receive it, and the coins came up over his face and his head and the laugh became a sound that was not a laugh anymore, and then there was no Sariel.

There was just one more small bright pile in the counting house of Greed.

I did not let myself look at the pile.

I want you to understand that. I am writing this down because it is the worst thing I have ever done, and I will not pretend otherwise. I did not let myself look at the pile. I knew that if I looked, I would go to it. I would dig through it. I would try to find him. And the moment I tried to find him, the coins would have me too, and the squad behind me would lose its head, and we would all of us end as small bright piles in the counting house, and Greed would not even have to interrupt his counting.

I looked away from where Sariel had been.

I looked at Greed.

I said: “Get up.”

Greed laughed without looking up. “I am counting, little blade. Be patient.”

“Get up, or I will come over there and put my sword through your ledger.”

He stopped counting.

He looked at me, finally, properly. His small wet eyes, set in the doughy gray flesh of his face, considered me with a kind of mild surprise — the surprise of a man who has been told, for the first time in his long existence, that something he wanted was not for him.

I will not tell you about the fight. It was ugly. Greed is ugly to fight, because Greed does not fight back so much as he swallows, and we lost Phanuel and Zuriel in the swallowing.

Phanuel was praying. Of course she was praying — she prayed at every threshold, and the counting house was nothing if not a threshold — and she was halfway through one of the old prayers, the one the first angels used to say before crossing dark water, when the floor opened under her feet. It opened from nowhere, opened as though someone had pulled a door I could not see, and the hole was full of teeth. I heard half the prayer. I heard the word deliver and then the teeth, and then nothing. I have never heard the end of that prayer. I do not think I want to.

Zuriel died laughing. The chest of jewels she struck with her sword — it opened around her arm and pulled her in past the shoulder and would not let her go, and Tamael had to cut her arm off to free her, and she bled out in the candlelight, the severed hand still inside the chest, still gripping the sword, still taking with its last reflex, because Greed had her too by the end. And through all of it — through the arm and the cutting and the slow bleeding — she was laughing. That bright, nervous, terrified laugh, the one the squad had come to hear as reassurance. She was laughing because she was afraid, and the laughter meant she was still alive, and it kept going until it didn’t, and the silence after it stopped was the worst sound in the counting house.

Ezekiel killed him. Old patient Ezekiel, who had asked at the gate only will we come back. He walked through the counting house with his standard in one hand and his sword in the other and he did not look at any of the treasure, did not glance at it, did not so much as acknowledge that it was there — and Greed, who lived only by being looked at, who fed on the looking, could not touch him. Ezekiel walked up to the chair of stacked treasure and he hauled Greed down off it by the throat and he cut Greed’s belly open along the seam of his fat gray robe, and everything Greed had ever swallowed came pouring out onto the candlelit floor — coins and crowns and jewels and broken blades and torn banners and bright bones and names torn from the fallen and Sariel, my Sariel, my bright young Sariel, his body whole and unhurt and his bright grin frozen on his cold face — and Ezekiel stepped back from the spreading flood of it, and looked at me, and said quietly:

“He was a good lad, my lord. We will carry him.”

We carried what we could. We carried Sariel out of the counting house of Greed. We found what was left of Phanuel beneath the broken floor. We gathered Zuriel, and we laid the three of them down in a small dark place where the road bent, and we said over them what we knew to say, and Nuriel still did not speak. But she knelt beside Sariel for a long time, and she held his cold hand, and she did not weep, because she had decided, I think, that she was not going to weep until she had killed something.

We were nine.

The road went down.

Chapter Five: Lust

I will be brief about Lust, because I do not have the right to be otherwise.

The third layer was a garden. It was warm, and dim, and full of soft sounds, and the air smelled of every good thing I had ever wanted and of some good things I had not known I wanted until I smelled them in that air. There was no Lust on a throne, no Lust on a tower, no Lust counting amid his coins. Lust does not need to be seen. Lust is the room.

The garden showed us, each of us, the thing we most wanted.

I will not tell you what it showed me. That is mine.

I will tell you about Camael, because he deserved more than a sentence from me, and I have given him less than that for a long time.

He was walking beside me on the soft path — the largest of us, the gentlest, the one who moved carefully even in Hell because he was always aware of how much space he took up — and I saw his step slow the way a step slows when the body hears something the mind has not yet admitted to. He turned his head. Not sharply. The way you turn toward a voice you have been waiting for your whole life and had stopped believing you would hear.

His sword fell out of his hand. He did not notice. His hands opened — both of them, palms up, the way you open your hands when the thing you have been carrying is finally, finally being taken from you — and his face changed. I have seen a thousand faces in battle and in grief and in the small hours before dawn. I have never seen a face do what Camael’s face did. The weight went out of it. The care went out of it. Every careful, gentle, measured thing about him — every wall he had built to make sure his largeness never hurt anything smaller — came down at once, and what was left was a man seeing something he loved, and the love was so plain and so ordinary that it made the garden feel like a holy place instead of a trap.

He said, in a voice I have not been able to forget: “Oh. Oh. You came. You did come. I knew you would.”

And he stepped off the path, into the green, and the green took him softly, and we did not see him again.

I did not follow him. I want you to know that I thought about it. The garden was pulling at all of us — I could feel it, the soft steady pull of it, the way warm water pulls at a body that has been cold for too long — and for one breath I almost went after him. Not to save him. To see what he was seeing. To feel what he was feeling. I did not go. I told the squad to keep walking. They kept walking. And Camael stayed.

There is a thing I must tell you here, because I owe the truth, and the truth does not always come in the right order. Somewhere in the green — after Camael, before what came next — I heard a sound. Not the garden’s sounds, not the soft whispers, not the warm air moving. A footstep. A single careful footstep, behind us and to the left, the kind of step a man makes when he does not want to be heard.

I turned. There was nothing. The green was empty and still.

I told myself it was the garden. I will tell you now that I am not sure it was.

We walked on.

Anael was next. I should have watched her more closely. She was a healer, and healers carry the wounds they cannot close, and the garden knew that. It knew what she had been carrying since the lower wars — the thing she had told me about once, long ago, in a quiet voice, in a quiet room, the only time I ever saw her hands shake.

Her hands were not shaking now. That is how I knew the garden had her. I looked back and her hands were still — perfectly still, steady the way they had never been steady, the tremor she had carried for centuries simply gone — and she was looking at something on the path that was not there for the rest of us, and her face was young. Not young the way angels are young — we do not age — but young the way a face is young when the thing that aged it has been taken away. Whatever she had failed to fix, the garden was fixing it. I could see it in the way she breathed. She breathed the way you breathe when you have been holding your breath for a very long time and have finally, finally been told you can stop.

She knelt on the path. She wept. Not the weeping of grief. The weeping of someone watching a wound close.

I went to her. I said her name. She struck my hand away — the first time she had ever raised a hand to me — and she said, “My lord. Please. Please. Just an hour. Just one hour and I will follow.”

I could not give her an hour. I knew what an hour meant in that garden. An hour would become a day and a day would become forever, and Anael would kneel there on the soft path with her healed hands and her young face and she would never stand up.

I left her on the path, weeping. And I have wondered since — every day since — whether an hour would have been enough.

I will tell you that Tamael almost stayed. He saw something — he never told me what — and he stopped, and his face went the way a face goes when the long and patient thing inside a man finally cracks, and he stood there in the green for a long moment, and Nuriel of all people — Nuriel, who had not spoken since Pride’s city — Nuriel took his hand and said, “Sergeant. Walk.” And he walked.

She had her voice back, after that. She did not say much with it. But she had it back.

I will tell you that I do not know how we killed Lust. I do not. The killing is gone from me. I remember the path, and the soft sounds, and the smell of the air, and I remember standing at last in a small green clearing with my sword bloody and Lust dead at my feet in a shape I will not describe, and I remember the others standing around me, and I remember Ezekiel saying gently, “My lord. We have to go.” But I do not remember the sword going in. I have wondered, since, whether one of the others did it for me. None of them have ever told me. I have not asked.

We were seven.

The road went down.

Chapter Six: Envy and Gluttony

I will put these two together, because they happened together, because Envy and Gluttony share a layer in the deep places — they are siblings of a kind, and they prey on each other as much as on us — and because if I separate them I will have to write about Envy alone, and I do not think I can.

The fourth layer was a long hall. There was a feast laid out the length of it. Gluttony sat at one end of the hall, eating, and Envy sat at the other end, watching Gluttony eat, and neither of them looked at us when we came in.

“Don’t sit down,” I said. “Don’t eat. Don’t look at the food. Don’t look at him looking at the food. Eyes on me.”

Six pairs of eyes on me. Ezekiel. Nuriel. Tamael. Gadiel. Lariel. Remiel. All that was left.

We walked the long hall down the middle. The feast was on either side of us. I will not tell you what was on the table. Some of it was beautiful. Some of it was not. I kept my eyes on the far end, on Gluttony at his plate, and I walked.

Halfway down the hall, Envy spoke.

He did not raise his voice. He was at the far end, leagues away it seemed, and yet his voice was right at my ear, the way a voice is when it is inside your own head.

“You left her on the path,” Envy said softly. “Anael. You left her weeping. Did you know she is still there? She is. She is still there, my lord, and she will be there forever. You could have saved her. You did not. You walked on. The way you walked on from your brother at the gate.”

I did not answer.

“You left him too, didn’t you,” Envy whispered. “Bleeding. In the dark. With a wound in his side. You said you would find each other. Will you, my lord? Will you find each other? Or will you fall in the deep places, the way Sariel fell, the way Ithuriel fell, the way Phanuel and Zuriel and Camael and Anael fell — and your brother, your brother who told you to go, your brother who was the only one of you who could see — your brother will die there, in the dark, alone, waiting for the brother who never came—”

“Eyes on me,” I said. My voice was not steady. “Eyes on me.“

Behind me, I heard Gadiel stop walking.

I did not turn. I knew. I knew the sound of it, by then — the soft sound of one of mine going still, the small sound of a heart turning toward a thing it should not have heard. I kept walking. I had to.

“He is right, you know,” Envy whispered, but he was not whispering to me anymore, he was whispering to Gadiel. “It should have been you, Gadiel. Carrying the standard. Leading the squad. Not Ezekiel. Not your lord. You. You were the better of them, and they have always known it, and they have always kept you small—”

The voice was Envy’s. But there was something under it — something that fed the words, something that knew exactly which wound to press because it had been listening — and I heard Gadiel’s breathing change, and I heard the doubt become certainty, and I knew, before I heard the sound of it, what was about to happen.

I heard Gadiel’s sword come out of its sheath.

I heard Ezekiel’s voice — old, patient, very gentle — say, “Brother. No.“

I heard the sound of Gadiel striking. And the sound of Ezekiel parrying. And then the sound of Ezekiel — old Ezekiel, who had asked only will we come back — putting his sword through Gadiel’s heart. Ezekiel had been a soldier longer than Gadiel had been alive. There had only ever been one way that fight was going to end.

I did not turn around. I could not. Eyes on me.

We walked on.

At the end of the hall, Gluttony was waiting. His plate was clean. He was holding a knife and a fork and he was smiling at us with red teeth, and he said, “The feast is not finished, little blade. You have not had the last course. Sit down. Stay a while.”

We did not sit down.

I will tell you what I have not told anyone, even the host: it was Nuriel who killed Gluttony. Nuriel, who had not spoken in two layers, who had spoken once in the green for Tamael, who had held Sariel’s cold hand in the dark beside the counting house. She walked up to the table where Gluttony sat and she put her hand on his shoulder, almost tenderly, and she said:

“You ate him. Didn’t you. In Pride’s city. You ate Ithuriel.”

I did not know if it was true. Ithuriel had come down in pieces in the gold light, and Nuriel had caught what she could of him in her hands. Not all of him. Not nearly all of him. Where the rest went, I had not asked. Nuriel had.

He looked up at her, his red mouth full.

He said, “…I might have.”

And Nuriel cut him in half across the table.

She did not stop cutting until there was no piece of him left larger than a fingernail. We stood around her in a circle, the rest of us, and we did not stop her, because none of us wanted to.

When she was done she looked up at me, and her eyes were dry, and she said, “He also took Gadiel’s name out of the book. Did you hear him do it. Just now. I heard him.”

I had not heard. I do not think it was a thing she had heard. I think it was a thing she needed to be true. So I told her yes. I told her I had heard it too. And we wrote Gadiel’s name in our own book, the small one we carried, before we left that hall.

Envy, in all of this, had not moved.

He sat at his end of the long ruined hall and he watched us mourn Gadiel and butcher Gluttony, and he watched, and he watched, and he wept, because he could not be us. He could not have what we had. He could not have the grief — and the grief was ours, and to be ours was the only crime he could not forgive.

I walked the length of the hall back to him.

I did not speak to him. There was nothing to say. He looked up at me and his weeping face was the face of a child who had been told he could not have a thing, and he opened his mouth to say, “It should have been—”

I cut his throat before he finished the sentence.

He died still trying to finish it. I did not let him.

We were six.

The road went down.

Chapter Seven: Wrath

Wrath was a battlefield. Of course Wrath was a battlefield. There is nothing else Wrath could have been.

It was a wide red plain under a sky the color of an old bruise, and there was a war going on across the whole of it — ten thousand things fighting ten thousand other things, killing each other, getting up, killing each other again, screaming, bleeding, never tiring, never stopping. The plain went on as far as we could see. There was no other side.

Wrath was in the middle of it.

He did not have a throne. He did not have a tower. He did not have a counting house or a garden or a feasting hall. Wrath had a fight, and he was in the heart of it with his two swords, and he had been in the heart of it forever, and when he saw us coming he laughed, and the laugh was a thing made of teeth.

“More,” he said. “Good. Good. More. Come on, then. Come on.” COME ON.

I will not pretend the fight was clever. There was no thinking in that layer. The plain itself was the trap — once you set foot on it, the fight took you, and you could not stop, you could not think, you could only swing.

We lost Lariel first. She had been singing — she had been singing since the gate of Heaven, the old walking songs, the ones that kept our feet in time — and on the plain she was still singing, and it was the singing that saved us, for a while, because the rhythm of it kept us moving, kept us swinging in time, kept us from the pause that would swallow us. But even a song has to breathe. She paused for one breath — one breath — and something pulled her down. Something at her ankles, a hand or a shadow or a thing that should not have been there. The plain swallowed her and she became one more of the ten thousand things, fighting forever, never tiring, never stopping. I saw her face for one moment in the press of the bodies, and her eyes were already empty, and she was already swinging at someone who was already swinging at her, and she would be swinging when the world ended. But her mouth was still moving. She was still singing. The song was in there, somewhere, in the ten thousand, and I could almost hear it.

I do not know how to write about that. I have tried.

Remiel went next. He had been doing what he always did — scratching a mark on the ground with his white stone, drawing an arrow, making sure we could find the way back — and the pause to draw was the same as the pause to breathe. Something caught his ankle. Something pulled. He went down with the stone still in his hand and his arm still outstretched, still trying to finish the arrow, still trying to mark the road home. I saw the stone skitter across the red ground as the plain took him. It was pointing back the way we had come. He had been trying, even at the end, to make sure we could find our way out.

Tamael killed Wrath in the end. Sergeant Tamael, who had held the line when captains fell, who had walked through the green of Lust with Nuriel’s hand on his arm. He had led squads in the lower wars and he knew, in a way the rest of us did not, that there is only one way to fight Wrath — you do not fight him angry. You fight him bored. You fight him as a tradesman fights the day’s work, with a tired patience, with a craftsman’s eye, with no feeling, because feeling is what feeds him. Tamael walked into the heart of the plain with his sword in a low guard and his face perfectly empty, and he fought Wrath the way a butcher works through a long shift. He did not shout. He did not curse. He blocked, and he parried, and he stepped, and he cut, and after a long while — I do not know how long, time worked strangely in that plain — Wrath was on his knees, and Wrath was screaming, because Tamael had not given him a single moment of hate to feed on, and Wrath was starving.

Tamael cut his head off without a word. He came back to us across the red plain, stepping over the dying things of the ten thousand armies, and his face was still empty, and he said, “My lord. We should go.”

We should have. But Tamael had been on the plain too long. The empty in him was not, anymore, a discipline. It was a wound. He walked off the plain with us — he made it that far, he was a sergeant — but a few steps into the next dark he stopped, and he said, “My lord, I am going to sit down for a moment,” and he sat down, and he did not get up.

He did not die. He was simply spent. Nuriel knelt beside him and laid her hand on his face, and he smiled at her, faintly, the way a flame leans before it goes out. She said, “Sergeant.” He said, “I know.” That was all of it.

We left him there. He asked us to. He said he would catch up if he could and we both knew he could not, and Nuriel kissed his forehead, and we left him.

I looked back. I do not know why. I had not looked back at the gates when I left my brother. I had not looked back in the garden when I left Anael. I had not looked back in the hall when I heard Gadiel’s sword come out. But here, in the dark after Wrath, with Tamael sitting against the wall and the red plain still glowing behind him, I looked back.

He raised one hand. A small wave. The kind of gesture a man makes when he wants you to know he is all right, even though you both know he is not.

I turned forward. Nuriel was watching me. Ezekiel was watching me.

We were three.

Ezekiel. Nuriel. And me.

The road went down.

We passed through Sloth’s domain on the way to the last layer, and I will tell you about it because it matters, even though nothing happened there.

It was empty.

That is the thing. It was a vast gray place — low-ceilinged, dim, heavy with a warmth that was not warmth so much as it was weight. The air pressed down. The floor was soft, almost gentle, the kind of surface a body could lie down on and never want to rise from. There were shapes in the gray — beds, or couches, or things that might have been either — and all of them were empty, and all of them were waiting, and the waiting had a pull to it that I cannot describe except to say it was the pull of stopping.

Sloth was dead. I had killed him on the slope. His domain had no master. But the domain itself was still here, still working, still whispering in the language it had always whispered: rest, stop, why go further, you have done enough, you have done so much, brother, just lie down, just close your eyes, just for a moment—

I almost did. I am not ashamed of that. After Wrath’s plain, after Tamael sitting down and not getting up, after everything — I almost lay down on that soft gray floor and closed my eyes. Nuriel took my arm. Ezekiel took the other. They walked me through it. I do not think I would have walked through it alone.

That is the power of Sloth, even dead. Even without a master, the domain remembers what it was built for. It waits. It will always wait. And it will always be easier to lie down than to keep walking.

We kept walking.

The road went down.

Chapter Eight: Death

The last layer was very quiet.

It was a vast, low domain of ash. There was no sky — there was a ceiling, a far-off vault of black stone, but no sky — and there was no horizon, only ash, going on. There was a single small fire burning, very far away. We walked toward it. We walked toward it for what felt like a long time. The ash came up around our boots and made no sound.

He was sitting by the fire.

He did not look up when we came. He was tending the fire — feeding it, slowly, with small dark sticks that I did not, at first, recognize as bones. He was vast. Not tall, the way Pride had been; not bloated, the way Greed had been. Vast in the way the deep places themselves are vast. He was the size of a thing the eye does not want to admit it is seeing.

His scythe leaned against a little cairn of stones beside him.

He looked up.

His eyes were not what I expected. I had been told stories all my long life of the Reaper, of the Lord of the Last Door, of the one who had existed before any of us, before the host, before the light, before the first morning — the captain of the Sins, the thing that had been waiting since before waiting had a name. The stories had given him eyes of fire, eyes of pits, eyes of nothing. He did not have those eyes. He had kind eyes. That is the worst thing I will tell you in this whole memoir. Death has kind eyes.

He said: “You came a long way, little blade.”

I could not speak.

He said, looking past me at Ezekiel and Nuriel: “And you. And you. I am sorry about the others. Truly. I would have liked to meet them in their own time. But the road is what the road is.”

Nuriel made a small sound. I do not know what it was. Ezekiel put his hand on her shoulder.

Death was quiet for a moment. He looked down at the small fire, at the bones he had been feeding it, and he said — almost to himself, almost as though he had forgotten we were there: “I felt each of them go. Every layer. The singer and the mapmaker — they are still in the plain. Still there. Still going.” He looked up at me. “The one who laughed. The one who prayed. I felt them all, little blade. I wish I could tell you it was quick. For some of them, it was.”

I do not know why he told me that. I do not know what it cost him to say it. But his voice when he said it was the voice of a man who has been sitting alone in the dark for a very long time, tending a fire he cannot let go out, waiting for visitors he does not want to hurt.

Death stood up. The fire stayed burning. He took the scythe from the cairn, and he looked at me, and his kind eyes were so terribly kind that for one full moment I forgot why I had come.

“You have done very well, little blade,” he said. “All seven of my Sins. Every one. Even Sloth, on the slope — I felt him go. No one has ever done that. You should be proud. I am proud, and that is no small thing, in this domain. But I think you know how this ends.”

I said, “I have to try.”

He nodded. Gravely. As though I had passed a small test. “Of course,” he said. “Of course you do. That is what you were made for.”

He came at me.

I will not describe the fight. I have tried, in the long years since, to set it down on paper, and I cannot. It was not a fight in any sense the word usually means. It was a grading. He tested me, the way a master tests a student, and each time I failed a test he marked it with a cut — here, on the shoulder, for the moment I oversigned a parry; here, on the thigh, for the moment I let my guard drift; here, across the cheek, for the moment I forgot my brother and fought only for myself. He was patient. He was endlessly kind. He was killing me by inches and he was being gentle about it.

Ezekiel came in at his back at one point. I saw it. I saw old patient Ezekiel, who had been a soldier longer than anyone remembered, step in behind Death with his sword raised — and Death did not turn, did not look, simply was somewhere else, and Ezekiel’s stroke cut nothing, and Death’s scythe came around behind him almost casually, almost regretfully, and Ezekiel was in two pieces on the ash before he knew he had been cut.

Nuriel screamed.

Death turned to her — this gentle, kind turn, this I am sorry, dear turn — and Nuriel was already on him, and her hands were full of her healer’s knives, and she stabbed him seventeen times before he caught her wrist. Seventeen. I counted, later, by the marks she had left in his side. He held her wrist almost tenderly, and he looked down at her, and he said:

“That was very good. That was very, very good. May I?”

She spat in his face.

He smiled a small sad smile and he broke her neck with his other hand, gently, the way you set down a sleeping child.

And I was alone.

I was on my knees. The scythe was coming up. I remember thinking, with a clarity I had not had since the wall of the City: I have already lost everything that mattered. There is nothing left in me for you to take.

The scythe reached the top of its arc.

And from behind Death — from nowhere, from the ash, from a direction I had not known existed — a blade came through Death’s shoulder.

Death staggered. For the first time in the entire fight, Death staggered.

I looked up.

My brother was standing behind Death with a sword in his hand and no wound on his body — I was too grateful to wonder at that — his face, that quiet, watchful face, set in the calm expression of a man who has been waiting for exactly this moment.

“Hello, brother,” he said to me. “I found the other road.”

And then — because he was him, because he was always the one who arrived when the world was ending — he went at Death.

I do not fully remember what came next. I remember getting up. I remember my brother on one side of Death and me on the other. I remember the way we moved together — the old way, the way we had moved on the wall in the first wars, the way two blades move when they have been forged in the same fire — and I remember thinking, with a wild and soaring relief, he is here. He is here and we are together and we are going to win.

Death fought us both. He was vast and he was patient and his kind eyes were kind even now, even as he swung the scythe at the two of us, even as he cut my brother across the arm and me across the ribs. But he was wounded — Nuriel’s seventeen wounds in his side, and my brother’s blade in his shoulder — and he was, for the first time in his long existence, fighting on two fronts.

My brother was fresh. That is the thing I remember. I was bleeding from a dozen cuts, half-dead on my feet, running on nothing but the last empty fumes of whatever had gotten me through six layers of Hell. My brother was fresh. He moved the way he had moved on the slope of Heaven — fast, clean, certain — and he was smiling, and the smile was the smile of the high meadows, and I loved him so much in that moment that I forgot to wonder how he had gotten here.

Death fell slowly. He fell the way old towers fall, in pieces, with a great quiet dignity. When he was down at last he reached up — once — and touched my face, almost tenderly, the way you might touch something you had been waiting for a very long time and had finally met.

“Well done, little blade,” he said. Very softly. Almost a whisper. He looked past me at my brother, and something moved in his kind eyes — something I did not understand then, something that might have been recognition, or pity, or both — and then he was gone.

And we were alive.

And the ash was empty.

And the war was over.

My brother was beside me. He was whole and unhurt except for the small cut on his arm, and his sword was still in his hand, and he was looking at me with those eyes the color of sky before storm. I wanted — I wanted so badly, I wanted it the way the drowning want air — to put my forehead against his forehead and close my eyes and be done.

But I could not. Not yet. Because Ezekiel was in two pieces a few paces away, and Nuriel was curled on her side with her face peaceful and her healer’s knives still in her hands, and I owed them — I owed them at least the looking. I turned from my brother. I knelt beside Nuriel. I closed her eyes.

“Brother,” I said, with my back to him. “Brother, how did you—”

That was when something hit me from behind.

Chapter Nine: The Voice in the Ash

It went through me cleanly.

I want you to understand that. It mattered. He knew exactly where to put the blade. The angle. The depth. The rib it slid between. He had been practicing, and the work was very fine.

I knelt there in the ash with the point of it coming out the front of my chest. I looked down at it. I thought, the way the dying think — that’s mine. That’s my blood on that blade. How did it get out there.

He was right behind me. Standing where I had left him. I had turned away from him to kneel beside Nuriel, and he had not followed. He had waited. He had watched me close her eyes, and then he had put his sword through my back.

“I never thought you would actually do it,” he said. His voice was low. Fond. “You know. I have to say that. I am — genuinely — impressed.”

I tried to turn.

The blade did not let me turn far. I got my head around. I got my eyes around. And I saw him — my brother — standing in the ash behind me, with the blade in his hand and the blade in my back, and on his face an expression I had never seen in all our long existence together. Not cruelty. Not hatred. Patience. The finished look of a man who has just set down a tool he has been holding for a very long time.

He was smiling.

Not the small tired smile of the high meadows. A different smile. A completed smile.

And then — then — something broke in me that had not broken in any of the seven layers. Not even Pride, with his lying gravity, had done what that smile did. Because I knew that face. I knew the small tilt of his head. I knew the eyes the color of sky before storm. And everything in me — everything that was me, everything that had been forged in the first morning of the world to be me — rose up at once in my throat and came out in a single choked breath:

“Morning Star.”

The voice was not mine. It was small. It was a younger brother’s voice, not an archangel’s. The voice I had used in the high meadows when we were young, before the wars, before the ages, before he had become anything but the one who sat beside me on the wall and watched the edge where the light thinned.

“Morning Star. My brother.” “Why?”

He stopped.

I felt him stop, with his hand still on the blade in my back. For a long moment he did not move. I have thought, since, that perhaps the name reached him. Perhaps, for one breath, he remembered the one he had been before — the one who had sat with me on the wall with the gold light leaning, the one who had laughed honestly, the one who had told me one day I will take care of it, brother, and you can rest. Perhaps. I do not know. I only know that he stopped.

And then — because he was him, and because he was no longer him, and because both things were true — he went on.

He crouched in front of me. Carefully, the way you crouch in front of something that is bleeding out and might still bite. His face — his quiet, watchful face, the face I had loved my whole long existence — was very close to mine.

“You are wondering,” he said gently, “how I am here. And why.”

I was. I was wondering that very much.

“I will tell you all of it,” he said. “You deserve that. You have earned that.”

He told me.

He told me about the bargain. How he had gone to the Sins long ago — longer than I would believe, he said, and he was right, I did not believe it — and he had promised them Heaven. He had promised them the City and the host and the long gold light, and he had told them all they had to do was climb the slope, and he would open the gate. They believed him. They always believed him. “That is the thing about hungry things, brother. They cannot tell the difference between a promise and a flattery, and so any flattery, in their ears, sounds like a promise.”

He told me about the wound at the gates of Hell. “It was nothing. A small thing I did to myself with a small knife I had been hiding under my cloak for a very long time. The blood was real. The pain was real enough. But the wound was mine, brother. I chose it. I chose the depth and the angle and the place, and I will not pretend I am proud of how easily it fooled you.”

He told me about the gates. And here his voice changed — just slightly, just enough that I could hear, beneath the fondness and the patience, something that was almost satisfaction.

“I closed the gates, brother. Did you think Hell did that? Hell does not close its own doors. I closed them. I closed them so that the host could not follow. I closed them so that it would be you and me and twelve soldiers in the dark, with no one coming to save you, with no one coming to interfere. I needed a closed road. I needed you to have nowhere to go but down.”

He told me about the shortcut. “There are roads in this place that the Sins do not know. Old roads, from before the Sins were Sins. I have walked them. I have walked them for a long time, brother, longer than you would want to know, and I know every turning and every shadow and every door that opens from the wrong side. I was faster than you. I was always faster than you.”

And then he told me the rest.

He told me about the shadows.

“You are wondering how I was there and you did not see me. You did not feel me. Twelve of you and not one turned at the right moment.” He said this the way a teacher corrects a student. “There is a thing I can do, brother, that you cannot. That no one in the host can. I can make myself — absent. Not invisible. Not hidden. Absent. I can fold my presence down to nothing, the way you fold a wing, until there is no trace of me in the air — no aura, no warmth, no sense that anything is near. The Sins could not feel me in their own domains. Your twelve could not feel me at their backs. Even the deep places themselves did not know I was passing through them. There is only one other being in all of creation who knows this trick, brother, and He left His throne a very long time ago.”

He let that settle. Then:

“I was there, brother. Every layer. Every death. I was in the shadows behind you, and beside you, and above you, and I watched you lose them one by one.”

He was not smiling anymore.

“The coin that took Sariel — did you see the face on it? You did not recognize it. You should have. It was mine. I put it there. I put it where he would find it, because I knew he would pick it up, because he was young and bright and hungry and that is the kind they always take first.”

“Phanuel — the one who prayed. She was praying when I opened the floor under her. Did you hear the prayer stop? I did. I was right underneath her. She was saying deliver and then the teeth had her and the prayer never finished. I have thought about that, brother. The word she did not get to say. I wonder sometimes what it was.”

“Camael and Anael, in the garden. Camael I did not need to touch — he walked into the green on his own, eyes open, arms wide. The garden knew what he dreamed. Anael was harder. I whispered to her. I showed her what she wanted to see. The garden does the work, brother, but I gave it the shape. I knew what she carried. I used it.” He paused. “They did not stay, brother. That is the kindness I will not give you. They did not wander into the green and live forever in a beautiful dream. I killed them. After you left. After you walked on and told yourself they had chosen to stay. They were kneeling in the garden with their eyes closed and their faces peaceful, and I cut their throats, one and then the other, and they never opened their eyes. They died inside the thing they wanted most. I do not know if that is mercy or if it is the worst thing I have done. I have thought about it. I have not decided.”

“And Lust.” He said this differently. Quieter. “You do not remember killing Lust, brother. You have wondered about it. You stood in the clearing with your sword bloody and Lust dead at your feet, and you did not remember the sword going in.” He looked at me. “You did not remember it because it did not happen. You did not kill Lust. I did. Lust was the domain — she was the air, the warmth, the wanting. And she felt me. Through the concealment, through the silence, through every wall I had built around my presence — she felt me. She was the only one of them who did. She turned toward me in the green, and her eyes were open, and she said what I wanted. Not a name. Just the truth of it. She said: ‘the throne.’ And I knew she could see all of it.”

He stopped. And here — this is the part I have turned over in my mind ten thousand times since — his voice changed. Not louder. Not softer. Just — different. As though he was about to say something he had not planned to say.

“She was going to take you, brother. The garden was closing around you. I could see it. You were slowing. Your eyes were going soft. Another few steps and you would have stopped the way Camael stopped, the way Anael stopped, and the garden would have had you, and I would have lost the only being in creation who could stand beside me against Death. I cannot kill Death alone, brother. Neither can you. It had to be both of us. It was always going to be both of us.”

He paused.

“That is the reason I killed her. That is the strategic reason. I needed you alive.”

Another pause. Longer.

“But there was another reason, and I am not going to pretend it was not there. I could see the garden taking you, brother. I could see your face going the way Camael’s face went. And something in me — something under the plan, something I did not ask for and do not want — would not let it happen. Not to you. Not like that. Not kneeling in the green with your eyes closed, dreaming of something you wanted, while the garden ate you alive.”

He looked away from me. The only time in the entire confession he looked away.

“So I killed her. I took the sword from your hand — you were standing there with your eyes going soft, and you did not even feel me take it — and I killed her with your own blade, and I put it back in your hand, and I let you wake up standing over the body and believe you had done it. I took that from you too, brother — not just your friends, not just your trust, but the memory of a killing that was never yours.”

“Gadiel — that was the easiest. Envy did most of the work, but I fed him the words. I knew which resentments to press. I had been listening to Gadiel for a very long time.”

“Lariel — the singer. She paused for a breath between verses. One breath. I caught her ankle. The plain did the rest. She is still singing in there, brother, somewhere in the ten thousand. I can hear her, if I listen. Can you?”

“Remiel — the mapmaker. He stopped to draw an arrow on the ground. Marking the road home. I caught his ankle too. He was still reaching for his little white stone when the plain took him. He wanted so badly to make sure you could find your way back. He did not know there was no way back. I had made sure of that at the gates.”

“Tamael — poor steady Tamael. He fought clean. I will give him that. But Wrath was stronger than he should have been, brother, because I was feeding Wrath from the shadows. Every scream on that plain, every surge of fury — I stoked it. Tamael won, but the winning broke him, and that was my doing.”

“And after you left him — after you walked on and told yourself he would be all right — he got up, brother. He stood up. The sergeant kept his word. He was coming for you. And I put him back.”

“The plain does not kill, brother. It keeps.”

“Ithuriel was the hardest. He was good, brother. He was very good. He almost killed Pride clean. He almost came down alive. But I was behind him, in the gold light, and at the last moment — at the very last moment, when Pride was dying and the city was falling — I struck him. From behind. The way I have struck you now. He never saw me. He thought it was Pride’s last blow. It was not. It was mine.”

He sat back on his heels in the ash. He looked tired — genuinely tired, for the first time since I had known him.

“I did not need to touch all of them, brother. Some were weak enough that the domains would have taken them without me. Zuriel — the one who laughed — Greed would have swallowed her whether I was there or not. I only put my hand on the ones who might have survived.”

He looked at me. And here — this is the part I cannot forgive, this is the part that keeps me — his eyes were wet.

“I needed you alone at the bottom, brother. I needed you to have no one left. And I needed Death dead before I killed you, because Death is the only thing in this world or the lower world that could have stopped me, and neither of us could kill him alone. That is why I came in. That last fight — that was the two of us the way it was supposed to be, the way we were forged — and I want you to know that. That part was real.”

I said: “Why.”

He nodded. As though I had asked the right question.

He stood up.

He was tall. I had forgotten how tall he was. Or perhaps he had only just become tall, in this moment, in the ash, as his wings opened behind him.

They had been white. I know they had been white. But as they opened, the white drained from them in a slow, controlled darkening, feather by feather, until they were the color of a sky just before a storm. Not the bright wings of the host. Not the wings I bore. Something else. Something older.

“Because the throne is empty, brother,” he said.

And as he said it, something flared behind him, faint and red, half-seen through blood and ash and the dark. Not a crown. Not yet. A broken halo of wanting, thorned like a rose, trembling around the storm of his wings.

“It has been empty for longer than you would want to know. And someone must sit on it. And when I looked — at the host, at the Sins, at the long slow death of the lower world — I could not, in all my searching, find anyone who deserved it more than I did.”

He looked down at me with something that was almost tenderness.

“I love you, brother,” he said. And he sounded, for one terrible moment, as though he meant it. “I have loved you since the first morning. I want you to know that. I want you to carry it.”

He was quiet for a breath. Then:

“But there is a thing I love more. It is waiting at the top of the world, on an empty throne, and I cannot get to it with you alive. I am sorry. I would have preferred — truly, I would have preferred — to lose you on a different day.”

He raised his sword.

And then — behind him, behind us, at the far edge of the ash where the road came down from the layers above — light.

Gold light.

The light of Heaven, pouring into the ash like water breaking through a dam, and with it the sound of a thousand wings, and with the wings the sound of trumpets, and with the trumpets the host — the host of Heaven, armed and shining and furious, breaking through the gates he had sealed, breaking through the layers he had emptied, pouring down the long red road into the bottom of the world.

They had found a way. The Sins were dead, and the layers were weakening, and the gates he had closed were cracking, and they had found a way, and they were here, and they could see him.

They could see him standing over me with his sword raised. They could see his wings — the wrong wings, the storm-colored wings that were not the wings of the host. They could see the blade in my back and the blood on his hands.

He froze.

I saw his face. I have wondered, since, what would have been on it — but I do not have to wonder, because I saw it. I saw the calculation. I saw him weigh it — the sword in his hand, the brother bleeding at his feet, the host descending. I saw him measure the distance and the time and the odds. I saw him look at me, and look at them, and look at me again.

And I saw him choose.

He lowered the sword.

He stepped back.

He could have killed me. He had the time. One stroke, one breath, and I would have been done and he could have fought his way through whatever came next. But he did not. He stepped back, and he lowered the sword, and in that moment I understood something about my brother that I had not understood in all our long existence: he was afraid. Not of the host. Not of their swords or their fury or their numbers. He was afraid of dying. He had spent his whole long life making sure that other people died in his place — the Sins, my squad, me — and when the moment came to stand and face what he had done, he could not do it. He was a schemer and a shadow, and he was not a man who could stand in the light and bleed.

He was, in the end, a coward.

The storm-colored wings spread wider behind him, and I heard the wind of them in the air above the ash, and I heard him laugh once, softly, with something that was not fondness anymore. Something thinner. Something that sounded like a man convincing himself he has not lost.

And then he said it.

In all the years we had stood the wall together, in all the ages he had been on my left, in all the gold afternoons and all the silent nights and all the small conversations about nothing — he had called me brother. Only brother. As he called me now, one last time, softly, with the sword in my back and my blood drying on his hand:

“I will see you again, brother.”

And then, because the host was pouring into the ash behind us, because there was no time, because he wanted me to understand, he said the other thing. The thing he had never said in all our long existence together, because there had never been a need — a brother does not need a brother’s name. He said it now. For the first time. And he said it the way a king says the name of a subject he is leaving behind:

“I will see you again. Michael.“

And that hurt me more than the blade.

There was a sound of great wings beating. There was a sound of him going up, and up, and up, and out — not back the way he had come, not toward the host that was descending, but somewhere else, somewhere I did not know existed, a third road that was not Heaven and was not Hell and was his own.

Then he was gone.

I lay forward onto the cold ash. The blade was still in my back. Ezekiel in two pieces a few paces away. Nuriel curled on her side, her face peaceful. The Sins dead in their domains and Sloth dead on the slope above, and the road of the descent strewn with the bodies of my twelve, and the host of Heaven standing in the ash around me with their swords drawn and their faces white, because they had seen it. They had all seen it.

And I lay there, with my face on the ash at the bottom of all things, and I understood — at last, too late, with a clarity I would have given my sword arm not to have — that the war had never been about Heaven.

It had never been about the Sins.

It had never even been about the throne.

It had been about me.

And my brother — my brother, who had been kindled with me in the first morning of the world, who had stood the watch beside me for ages no one bothered to count, who had smiled at me in the high meadows when we were young, who had once, on a gold afternoon on the wall, said something to me I had not understood until that very moment — my brother had wanted me to walk down this road since before I could remember being alive. He had needed me to clear the way for him. He had needed me to do the killing he could not do himself. And he had let me think, for the whole long descent, that he was coming back for me. That he was on my side. That we were brothers.

And then he had walked beside me, in the shadows, and killed my friends one by one.

And then he had stood beside me, in the ash, and helped me kill Death.

And then he had put his sword through my back.

The host was all around me now. They were not singing the songs of bringing-home. They were silent. They had seen what had happened and they did not know what to sing.

I closed my eyes.

The last thing I remember thinking, before they lifted me out of the ash, was his name — the one I gave him myself, there with my back broken and his blade still wet, the name the Morning Star becomes when the light in it goes out, the name I could not bring him back from.

Lucifer.

I did not say it aloud. I did not have the breath. But it was in my mouth like a coin, and I bit down on it, and I held it, and I have held it ever since.

The host lifted me. They were weeping. Not for joy. Not for victory. They were weeping because they had seen what my brother had done, and they understood, now, what the war had really been, and the understanding was worse than any wound.

I let them carry me.

Above us, the long red road went up, and up, and up, toward the white wall and the gold light and the empty place where my brother had been.

And somewhere, far out beyond the ash — on the third road, the one that was not Heaven and was not Hell, the one that was his — my brother was flying.

And he had said my name for the first time in all our long existence.

And he had said it as a goodbye.

And he had promised he would see me again.

And I — God help me, God help us all — I am going to be waiting.

Epilogue: The Gold Light

There was an afternoon.

There was an afternoon on the wall, when the gold light leaned the way it always leaned, and my brother was beside me, and neither of us spoke. That was usual with us. We could sit together for half a day without a word and it was not coldness. It was the thing that brothers have and people who are not brothers do not entirely understand.

He had been restless that day. I could tell by the small movements — a hand on his knee, a shift of weight, the way a body moves when the mind inside it will not be still. I was not restless. I was very still. I had been still for a long time, carrying something I did not know how to put down.

After a while he asked me a question. I gave him part of the truth. He accepted it the way he accepted everything I gave him — wholly, without suspicion. He did not know there was more. I did not tell him.

After a while I said a small thing — a promise about rest, about a day that had not come yet. He laughed. He cuffed me on the shoulder, the way he had done when we were both young in the high meadows. I laughed too. It was a good afternoon. The gold light was warm and my brother was beside me and the laugh was honest and for a moment nothing else was true.

The gold light leaned. It always leans.

After the laugh he went quiet. I said something else — a small thing, about not coming to look for me, about reasons, about remembering. He said he would remember. He kept that promise, through everything, and the gold light is still leaning, and I love you, Michael, and the afternoon has not grown any lighter.

Author’s Note

This story started in college, as a game I never coded. My brother Ariel and my sister Sarina helped me find the heart of it — two brothers and a betrayal — on an afternoon of loving siblings, not so different from the one you just read. The idea stayed with me for years. The characters grew. The betrayal got worse. I always knew the story I wanted to tell. I just didn’t know how to write a novel — so AI was my ghostwriter. The story is mine.

To my parents and my family on both sides — every one of you is somewhere in these pages. To my wife, Angela, the one who never says no to my crazy ideas. And to my daughter, Amira — the light of my eyes and my soul. This story is about brothers and betrayal and war, but the reason I finally wrote it down is you.

— Emil Landron