35.2

Astaroth’s jaw tightens. His attention to detail is so great that the muscles at the junction between his jaw and skull (were he human) and down his neck became taut as iron rods. Roisin could have drawn the muscles easily as the cascades of memories from her anatomy classes came flooding back, and just for a moment she saw the angel devoid of human skin; just a mobile, moving mass of expanding and contracting muscles around a skeletal core. “He’s not tearing it down, he’s correcting it from first principles.”

Roisin frowns. “I don’t follow. What does that mean?”

Astaroth gestures to the unravelling path. “He’s removing everything that contradicts the original script, everything that changed or evolved since before you opened the Sixth Seal.”

Roisin’s brow furrows as she extrapolates exactly what he means. “He’s removing me?”

“He’s trying to.” Astaroth squeezes her hand. “Not if we reach him first. Your mercy is like unto Iesu but I can’t help but wish you’d ended him when you had the chance.”

Roisin looks at Namaan. “Iesu?”

The Nephilim shrugs. “No clue.”

“The son of God,” Astaroth says, looking over his shoulder to catch Roisin’s hand to spur her on. “Jesus, you call him, and rarely, to the delight of all the Fallen, do you evoke his name in praise.”

“Merciful as Jesus?” She mutters to Namaan as the Fallen One drags her forward. “I’m a fucking angel.”

As they move deeper, the structure around them begins to shift. Threads of meaning bend toward her, beams of logic reorient, membranes of possibility ripple in her direction. It is as if she is a perfect tone, issuing from a speaker upon which fine sand has been spread, shifting into patterns as they journey through the landscape of possibility. She wonders what it looks like from above, and suddenly the is there, looking down upon the prisms of Astaroth and Namaan, and the patterns she has made as she hurries are the scribbles and spirographs she seen done by inmates of psychiatric hospitals, when they draw what they see inside their heads. They have been seeing the Architecture of Creation, but don’t have the vocabulary to reveal it to any other mortal, so of course they are institutionalised as insane. In other ages, they would be venerated as saints or cursed as the victims of possession.

Astaroth appears suddenly beside her, leaving Namaan on his own below them. “We don’t have time to dally,” he says, and then looks down. “Oh. That’s new.”

Roisin indicates the tonal patterns below. “What’s happening?”

“The architecture is recognising you and reorganising itself around you, or trying to. That’s pretty awesome, actually. It’s like you have the opposite power to Hamed the Annihilator.”

“Why?”

Astaroth looks at her with something like awe. “Because you’re the Sixth Seal. You’re revelation. You’re the only thing left that wasn’t fixed by Creation.”

“The opposite power to Hasmed? Does that mean I’m the Creator?”

He frowns and takes a moment before replying. “I don’t think so,” he says, “because you are the Sixt Seal, and the Sixth Seal can’t be the Creator as well. Besides, you don’t have the mantle of Creation, so that’s pretty much the underline. You’re more like the Builder, where Hasmed is the Destroyer.”

“Is that so?” Roisin returns to Namaan’s side, who looks relieved at their return.

“He is causing misalignment,” he says. “We should hurry.”

Roisin feels the mantle pulse again. The architecture bends and the path ahead widens.

A vast chamber opens before them — a cathedral of scaffolding and light but half of it is gone. It has been erased and displays only the smooth infinity of the void. At the edge, where the altarpiece would be in a physical cathedral, stands Hasmed, his wings dim but steady, and the void coils around him like a crown as he rewrites the world. He is removing everything that contradicts the script; ending the world cleanly, according to the original blueprint.

Astaroth steps forward. “Hasmed. Brother. Stop.”

Hasmed does not turn and his voice is as calm and unfluctuating as the void replacing the architecture. “I cannot stop. The world must end as it was written.”

Roisin steps beside Astaroth and her voice is steady and as resonant as the single note of an oboe in a packed and silent amphitheatre; as pure as the vermillion pigment ground from a nugget of cinnabar: “Hasmed. Look at me.”

He turns, his expression altering, just for a moment, into shock before it returns to the chiselled face she has come to recognise as his preferred form. His wings flare. “You are the Revelation. You should not exist.”