36.6

 

This time Gabriel manages to touch the mantle, closing his eyes momentarily as the sparks of void arc between the mantle and his form but as he begins to lift it from its resting place in the chest cavity of a dead angel, the architecture convulses.

Roisin feels the mantle pulse not toward Gabriel, but away from him, as if it had the ability to move by the reaching of its light.

Astaroth grabs Roisin’s arm. “Roisin — it’s reacting to you.”

She shakes her head. “No. I can’t take it, either. Not without giving up the seal, and if I did that…”

He finishes for her. “You would become separated into components like the Nephilim.”

Roisin takes another step forward. “You are not it wants, Gabriel. It is knowledge and I am revelation. It wants to expose the truth of all things, and that is my function, not yours.”

Gabriel makes a shooing motion toward her. “Stay back, Nephilim. You’ve done enough damage already. This is not yours to claim.”

Roisin steps forward again, reaching for the mantle as it pulses once more. Seeing this, Gabriel tries to lift it free of Hasmed’s body but like an eyeball with the bundle of optic nerves still attached, it is still connected to the chest cavity of Annihilation, and then the chest cavity moves, shudders, rises.

Astaroth mouth drops open. “Oh no.”

Roisin steps back as, like the chestburster scene from an Alien movie, Hasmed’s torso splits open further and the mantle’s connection to it is revealed to be not a bundle of fibres at all, but the flesh of an arm.

Roisin retreats further as the mantle is pulled back into the chest cavity… Something is inside Hasmed; something that was waiting. Something that survived the Seventh Seal.

Gabriel tugs sharply on the mantle, hoping to dislodge it from the new arrival, but it is held fast. “Who dares to defile my presence?”

The corpse twitches as the void inside it ripples and then a hand emerges. It is pale, elegant and clawed like a beast. Muscle and sinew twist around the hand and down the arm attached to it; an old arm like an old man who has been a stonemason all his life and never thought to stop when a pension began to arrive in his bank account. A voice follows the arm, smooth as a blade: “Did you really think the Seventh Seal would open… and I would not come home?”

Arm muscles pop they pull themselves out of Hasmed’s hollowed torso like a serpent shedding its skin, dripping with Hasmed’s blood and flesh like a baby born fully grown from the womb. The arm is attached to a torso, the torso to head, legs, arm; bladed wings like the overlapping steel plates of a suit of scaled armour. The figure that emerges is mot monstrous or grotesque, but beautiful on a scale where the pant-wetting awesome ness of Namaan pales into mere commonplace. What appears to be an elderly man just past his prime stands,  brushing void‑dust from his shoulders  and smiles as Gabriel’s face turns white as the ash of a cremated angel. “Hello, little brother.” He stretches, as though waking from a long sleep.

Roisin nudges Astaroth, and tries to whisper “And this is..?”

“Lucifer, little one. It is delightful to see you again, Roisin. You were lost to us a long time ago.” He holds up the mantle of Knowledge, as if it were a medal he’s just been awarded. “Hasmed was a prison,” Lucifer says softly. “And I was the thing locked inside.”

Roisin shakes her head. “You were— inside him? I thought you ruled Hell?”

Lucifer smiles. “Where else would the First Rebel be imprisoned? Where else would the Creator hide the one being who could challenge His Judgement?” He takes a deep breath and releases it in a sigh of what can only be construed as satisfaction. “And where else would I wait for the world to break?”

Gabriel lunges for the mantle. “Lucy. Stop. Give that to me.”

Lucifer ignores him, pressing the mantle against his own chest where it flares not with void light, but with a pure clean light like sunshine over the top of the frozen peak of a mountain.

Astaroth frowns. “It knows him.”

“Of course it does.” Lucifer smiles as the mantle sinks inside him, the barest ripple of his torso suggesting the presence of ribs. “I was the first to question. The first to discern. The first to judge.”

Gabriel staggers backward. “No. No. That mantle is mine.”

Lucifer tilts his head. “You chose Creation, Gabriel. You cannot wield both. The Creator never did. God never did.” He steps closer, tilting his head to one side cockily. “And you, dear Gabriel… are not even God.”

Gabriel’s wings flare in fury. “I am the Creator now.”

“Then create.” Lucifer smiles as he raises his arms, palms outward. “And I will judge.”