24.2

 

The void is infinite, a place between Heaven and the Earth. It might exist in other planes as far as Roisin knows, but she knows nothing of them. She knows little enough about the void, only that it is a necessary place between here and there. Indeed, many just call it The Between, and refrain from calling it the void at all, since in an infinite space there exists infinite possibilities, and even angels would rather not conjure those. The void has no walls, no ceiling, no floor. It just is.

The name spoken doesn’t echo. It lands in the void like a magnet dropped into a lake whose surface is molten steel. Around Roisin’s physical body, the room inhales and the shadows contract away from the three beings in the doorway: human, Nephilim and angel, each playing high stakes with the fate of the world.

The Nephilim’s head snaps toward Steve with a sharp tilt reminiscent of a mantis about to snatch prey from a nearby leaf. It does not seem afraid but alert, as though something ancient has just caressed its buttocks. Roisin feels her connection to it jolt, not severed but interrupted, like a hand pulled from hers mid‑gesture.

Her breath stumbles and she feels the tether between her physical body and her angelic one quiver, like a fishing line suddenly snagged on an underwater obstruction. The air thickens and the temperature drops, though not from cold but from the absence of heat, as if the concept of being cool or warm has never even occurred to the subject.

It starts in the corner of the ceiling. A point of darkness that isn’t shadow, because it doesn’t belong to anything in the room, but more like a puncture, a place where the world is thinning. The point widens without tearing; without ripping; more like an iris, where arcs react with the growing absence of light and retract to allow more vision with exponentially less definition. It is reminiscent of the cheesy effect of a portal between worlds in a classic television sci-fi.

The Nephilim steps backward, its awareness tightening around the horse in its chest, not pulling it back as such, but tightening the rein, preventing it from leaving it altogether. It displays neither fear nor hostility, but it does seem to recognise the name and recognises it as something worthy of respect.

The voice arrives first, but not as a sound, as a vibration, a tingling in the nerves, an ache in the belly, a contraction of sphincter muscles. It enters each of them differently. The Nephilim reacts with caution, Steve staggers backward, as though the words are a pebble flung from David’s sling at his face; to Roisin, it feels like someone whispering directly behind her eyes:

“So soon?”

Roisin feels it like a tremor in her bones, a tremor which reaches her even in the void, shaking loose an image of the owner of the name, and the recognition of a former brother. She is pulled back into a memory. Her stomach drops. She knows this voice, this particular vibration. She knows it from long ago. Behind the point of darkness grows another presence. Not an angel, not as such, but one she recognises from before the rebellion. Astaroth, the angel of knowledge – or fallen angel now, she supposes. He was on the losing side of the revolution, where fully a third of the angels fought to save the world from destruction and failed. It provided the necessary diversion for Araksiel to enact the vanishing of the Nephilim.

Astaroth doesn’t appear in a burst of flame or a swirl of smoke, instead, he condenses from the air in a cloud of lettered script, like someone took all the letters from every alphabet that ever existed or ever would, and crushed them slowly into the singularity at the centre of a collapsed star. A tall figure, too sharply defined for the dim light, as if the shadows are outlining him with microscopic highlights. His suit is immaculate, blacker than the darkness he came from. His eyes are not red, not glowing — they are reflective, like polished obsidian, showing the room back to itself in distorted fragments.

His face contorts into a smile. Not a cheery smile like the bloke from the building site, nor the sinister one of a politician with a criminal record, but a knowing one, as though he has walked into a conversation he has been listening to for a long time.

His gaze moves first to Steve. “Breaking your promise already,” he murmurs, voice smooth as lacquer. “I’m flattered.”

Steve’s breath shudders. He doesn’t answer. He can’t.