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Chapter 45

They knelt at the rim of the Pit, with the stench of sulfur and rotting flesh, and the sounds of the screams of the damned-and-undying, thick and clinging as tar around them. Agonostis, still in human form, with his human flesh blistering and blackening in the heat, crouched next to Jezerael, whose angelic flesh tolerated the Hell-furnace, even if she was not immune to the pain.

Lucifer glowered over them, slashing at them with whips, screaming incoherent threats—howling.

Agonostis could not even breathe to scream. His lungs burned and shriveled in the heat, his arms and legs pulled in to his chest as his flesh tightened and baked. He still had the power within him to change into his other, ancient form—and he knew that the pain in that form would have been less. Still horrible, still mind-breaking sooner or later—but less. But he was not the creature he had once been, and he would not don again the body of the hated thing that had once been himself. Lucifer would change him and break him. Agonostis knew that. The Archfiend would alter his body into something unspeakable, would leave him groveling and pleading for some smallest sign of mercy, and would laugh when he broke. But Agonostis held onto the thin shreds of his hard-won near-humanity; what he was suffering, Dayne would have suffered, had he tempted her into damnation. If he could never be near her again, he could find some comfort in knowing what she would have felt, and in knowing that she was safe from Lucifer's vile touch.

Lucifer caught his breath, and crouched on hands and knees in front of them, so that he could look them both in the eye. "You insufferable fuck-ups," he said in a calmer, more rational voice, "you brainless, backstabbing, incompetent Pit-meat—I'm going to hold your trials and your sentencing here, right by the side of the Pit, so that you can hear the screams of the doubly damned and think on the consequences of your betrayal while you are tried. Pitchblende!" he shrieked. "Bring me the charges."

Agonostis' vision blurred—his eyes were dry and blistering. He couldn't blink, so that he saw a steady stream of images, but the images bore little relation to what he knew was actually there. Where there had been one towering form before him, though, now he made out two.

Beside him, Jezerael screamed monotonously, already sounding very much like the Pit-buried damnedsouls she would soon join. Over her screams, Pitchblende read out the charges.

"Jezerael, once Fallen from Heaven, once mighty in our sight . . ."

Lucifer had decided to try Jezerael first; Agonostis, familiar with his procedures, knew that this meant Jezerael's charges were lesser, and that Agonostis could therefore expect his torture, when it came, to be greater.

Pitchblende read on, through Jezerael's rank and title, and droned through the charges.

"That you did willfully do good, healing to full health a child, without gaining for Hell any compensation greater than the value of said child, and that you did neglectfully fail to include such internal failsafes in the healing as would cause the child to waste away and die, in spite of external appearances of health, and that you did fail to acquire the soul of Dayne Kuttner, for which sole purpose you had been placed on Earth. How then do you plead?"

Jezerael screamed on.

"She pleads guilty, Master of Iniquity, Lord of Hatred and Pain."

"So I hear." Lucifer's voice became oily—smug and self-satisfied. "I do not tolerate incompetence or betrayal—you have been an obstacle to my will through both. This is your sentence, then. The very molecules of your body will not tolerate the presence of each other. You who have been among the highest ranked of the creatures of Hell will now be less than the lowest. You will spend a million years in the Pit as constantly burning gas, a self-aware cloud every molecule of which will feel and recognize pain. You will remember all that you have been, and all that you could have been, and you will know that you will never be such as you are again. You will have no recourse in madness, nor hiding place in loss of self. And at the end of your first punishment, you will rebuild yourself as you can, one molecule at a time, into whatever oozing, stinking form you can manage, and so you will spend the rest of eternity."

Agonostis could see the motion of Lucifer's arm—he both heard and felt the explosion beside him as the Lord of Hell vaporized Jezerael. Her screaming, horribly, didn't stop. It hung in the air, ghostly and ululating.

Lucifer chuckled; if Agonostis had had any skin left to speak of, it would have crawled.

"The charges against you are worse," he said. "The punishment will be, too."

Agonostis could hear Dayne's voice in his head, whispering Repent! Repent! 

He would have if he could have, but one could not reach Heaven out of fear of Hell, and while the terror of what was about to become of him devoured him, he could still not abase himself before God and beg forgiveness. He could admit he was wrong—but he could not forgive God for all the things that had happened to him because he had been wrong.

Pitchblende read the charges, but Agonostis didn't listen. He heard only the sounds of the screams—only the anguish of the damnedsouls. He knew only that he would join them. So he didn't realize for an instant that Pitchblende had stopped reading, or that a third voice had intruded.

"So you charge him with loving a human, do you?" Agonostis recognized that voice. It had been more than millennia since he'd heard it—but the voice of God was not a voice any soul could ever forget.

Lucifer snarled, "My charges in my domain are my business. You have no place here."

"My place is where I choose to be, Lucifer—it has ever been thus. My business is what I say it is. And if you charge Agonostis with love of one of my children, I say my business is here."

"I'll drop that charge, then," Lucifer shouted. "I have enough others that I can sentence him to the deepest of misery for the rest of eternity."

God said, "Not so. There is no place in Hell for love. Anyone who loves truly will never be yours, Lucifer—and Agonostis loves truly."

"He doesn't love you." Agonostis could hear the sneer in the Archfiend's voice.

"No. He doesn't. But love is an emotion of hope and faith. If he does not love me now, that is of no matter. His soul is changed for the better, and may change further with time. He may come back to me someday. In the meantime, he is no longer yours."

An explosion of white light blinded Agonostis. The pain stopped, the screaming stopped, and he discovered that he could breathe again, and move his arms and legs. His knees buckled and he sobbed and fell to the ground—to a giving, spongy ground that felt like nothing he had ever touched before. His vision cleared. He was on a gray plain that was almost entirely featureless, though speckled in a few places with things of great beauty; Agonostis saw the steep banks of a rushing stream over to his right, and just a section of clear white water that rushed over huge, slick, moss-covered boulders with a delightful thunder. The stream began and ended in the nothingness of the gray plain, but the tiny section of it that existed was as lovely as anything the fallen angel had ever seen.

"This is Purgatory," God said. Agonostis looked around, but could not see God; his voice, though, was clearly audible. "Many souls find it a valuable place to work through the problems they could not deal with in life. The only things here are those things the soul creates for itself; things that have some deep significance. The creations fade after the soul has made its choice between Heaven and Hell, or has decided on one of the other options. I added Purgatory after you . . . left. You won't have seen what it can do, but its stillness and silence have been beneficial to many of my children."

Agonostis stood. He felt the peace of the place soak into him, but he did not desire such monklike peace. "Why have you brought me here, God?" he asked.

"What I told Lucifer was true. There is no place in Hell for love. But I didn't say the rest—it concerned none but the two of us. If Hell cannot hold you, Heaven cannot claim you either. There is no place in Heaven for the anger you still bear, Agonostis."

Agonostis looked around, then hung his head. "This second chance . . ." He sighed. "I don't want to appear ungrateful. I thank you with all my heart for pulling me from Lucifer's clutches."

God chuckled. "But . . . ?"

"You mentioned other options."

"There are always other options, Agonostis. They involve sacrifice, and they involve determination and courage, but there are always other options."

Agonostis swallowed, and took a deep breath. "Yes. Could I ask for one of these options? Could I return to earth?"

"To earth? I don't see how. You are neither Lucifer's angel nor mine. On earth, the powers of Hell now walk the streets in broad daylight; the powers of Heaven work, as they always have, in stillness and in subtlety. But you . . . with the forces of eternity to draw on, what power would you represent?"

"I would give up the powers of eternity."

Agonostis listened with heart tearing against his chest, while the Almighty pondered in silence.

"Would you?" God asked at last. "You don't know what it is to be human, Agonostis. You put on human flesh when you walked the earth, but the immortal you was still inside that flesh. You tasted both the love and the pain of human existence, but you did not taste the certain knowledge of death that drives my human children. Death is a goad, my son, the likes of which you have never known. It is the wellspring of human hope and fear, and of human creativity; all art and all science are the attempts of the human spirit to conquer it. You are a creature of eternal summer, Agonostis, and death is winter without the spring that follows. You have known many things, but you have never known grief—and if you are human, grief will shock you with its suddenness, and weigh you down with the burden of its company. It is because they can love and laugh and create beauty in the face of annihilation, knowing always that they must die, but never knowing when, that I place my human children above all the hosts of Heaven. Their courage is unlike anything you have ever experienced."

Agonostis squared his shoulders and said, "If I can be with Dayne, Almighty, I will willingly face death."

"You can take nothing with you, Agonostis, but your memories. Further, you will have a fleshly body, weak and mortal. You will have neither the powers of Hell nor the powers of Heaven—only those things that you can earn by the sweat of your brow will be yours. But you will have a human soul—and if, when you die, you are judged one of mine, you will be greater than you have ever been."

Agonostis nodded. "I understand."

God said gently, "Then go—and go with my blessing."

The gray, featureless silence of Purgatory swirled up around Agonostis, and filled his eyes and his ears and his mouth. He was filled by its emptiness, and felt himself changing, falling, growing weaker and more fragile, prey to pain and illness and huge, enveloping fear. Conversely, he felt excitement building within himself; the thrill of unimaginable adventure on the brink of happening, the wonder of a future of infinite possibility.

So this is what it is to be human, he thought.

Back | Next
Contents
Framed

Back | Next
Contents

Chapter 45

They knelt at the rim of the Pit, with the stench of sulfur and rotting flesh, and the sounds of the screams of the damned-and-undying, thick and clinging as tar around them. Agonostis, still in human form, with his human flesh blistering and blackening in the heat, crouched next to Jezerael, whose angelic flesh tolerated the Hell-furnace, even if she was not immune to the pain.

Lucifer glowered over them, slashing at them with whips, screaming incoherent threats—howling.

Agonostis could not even breathe to scream. His lungs burned and shriveled in the heat, his arms and legs pulled in to his chest as his flesh tightened and baked. He still had the power within him to change into his other, ancient form—and he knew that the pain in that form would have been less. Still horrible, still mind-breaking sooner or later—but less. But he was not the creature he had once been, and he would not don again the body of the hated thing that had once been himself. Lucifer would change him and break him. Agonostis knew that. The Archfiend would alter his body into something unspeakable, would leave him groveling and pleading for some smallest sign of mercy, and would laugh when he broke. But Agonostis held onto the thin shreds of his hard-won near-humanity; what he was suffering, Dayne would have suffered, had he tempted her into damnation. If he could never be near her again, he could find some comfort in knowing what she would have felt, and in knowing that she was safe from Lucifer's vile touch.

Lucifer caught his breath, and crouched on hands and knees in front of them, so that he could look them both in the eye. "You insufferable fuck-ups," he said in a calmer, more rational voice, "you brainless, backstabbing, incompetent Pit-meat—I'm going to hold your trials and your sentencing here, right by the side of the Pit, so that you can hear the screams of the doubly damned and think on the consequences of your betrayal while you are tried. Pitchblende!" he shrieked. "Bring me the charges."

Agonostis' vision blurred—his eyes were dry and blistering. He couldn't blink, so that he saw a steady stream of images, but the images bore little relation to what he knew was actually there. Where there had been one towering form before him, though, now he made out two.

Beside him, Jezerael screamed monotonously, already sounding very much like the Pit-buried damnedsouls she would soon join. Over her screams, Pitchblende read out the charges.

"Jezerael, once Fallen from Heaven, once mighty in our sight . . ."

Lucifer had decided to try Jezerael first; Agonostis, familiar with his procedures, knew that this meant Jezerael's charges were lesser, and that Agonostis could therefore expect his torture, when it came, to be greater.

Pitchblende read on, through Jezerael's rank and title, and droned through the charges.

"That you did willfully do good, healing to full health a child, without gaining for Hell any compensation greater than the value of said child, and that you did neglectfully fail to include such internal failsafes in the healing as would cause the child to waste away and die, in spite of external appearances of health, and that you did fail to acquire the soul of Dayne Kuttner, for which sole purpose you had been placed on Earth. How then do you plead?"

Jezerael screamed on.

"She pleads guilty, Master of Iniquity, Lord of Hatred and Pain."

"So I hear." Lucifer's voice became oily—smug and self-satisfied. "I do not tolerate incompetence or betrayal—you have been an obstacle to my will through both. This is your sentence, then. The very molecules of your body will not tolerate the presence of each other. You who have been among the highest ranked of the creatures of Hell will now be less than the lowest. You will spend a million years in the Pit as constantly burning gas, a self-aware cloud every molecule of which will feel and recognize pain. You will remember all that you have been, and all that you could have been, and you will know that you will never be such as you are again. You will have no recourse in madness, nor hiding place in loss of self. And at the end of your first punishment, you will rebuild yourself as you can, one molecule at a time, into whatever oozing, stinking form you can manage, and so you will spend the rest of eternity."

Agonostis could see the motion of Lucifer's arm—he both heard and felt the explosion beside him as the Lord of Hell vaporized Jezerael. Her screaming, horribly, didn't stop. It hung in the air, ghostly and ululating.

Lucifer chuckled; if Agonostis had had any skin left to speak of, it would have crawled.

"The charges against you are worse," he said. "The punishment will be, too."

Agonostis could hear Dayne's voice in his head, whispering Repent! Repent! 

He would have if he could have, but one could not reach Heaven out of fear of Hell, and while the terror of what was about to become of him devoured him, he could still not abase himself before God and beg forgiveness. He could admit he was wrong—but he could not forgive God for all the things that had happened to him because he had been wrong.

Pitchblende read the charges, but Agonostis didn't listen. He heard only the sounds of the screams—only the anguish of the damnedsouls. He knew only that he would join them. So he didn't realize for an instant that Pitchblende had stopped reading, or that a third voice had intruded.

"So you charge him with loving a human, do you?" Agonostis recognized that voice. It had been more than millennia since he'd heard it—but the voice of God was not a voice any soul could ever forget.

Lucifer snarled, "My charges in my domain are my business. You have no place here."

"My place is where I choose to be, Lucifer—it has ever been thus. My business is what I say it is. And if you charge Agonostis with love of one of my children, I say my business is here."

"I'll drop that charge, then," Lucifer shouted. "I have enough others that I can sentence him to the deepest of misery for the rest of eternity."

God said, "Not so. There is no place in Hell for love. Anyone who loves truly will never be yours, Lucifer—and Agonostis loves truly."

"He doesn't love you." Agonostis could hear the sneer in the Archfiend's voice.

"No. He doesn't. But love is an emotion of hope and faith. If he does not love me now, that is of no matter. His soul is changed for the better, and may change further with time. He may come back to me someday. In the meantime, he is no longer yours."

An explosion of white light blinded Agonostis. The pain stopped, the screaming stopped, and he discovered that he could breathe again, and move his arms and legs. His knees buckled and he sobbed and fell to the ground—to a giving, spongy ground that felt like nothing he had ever touched before. His vision cleared. He was on a gray plain that was almost entirely featureless, though speckled in a few places with things of great beauty; Agonostis saw the steep banks of a rushing stream over to his right, and just a section of clear white water that rushed over huge, slick, moss-covered boulders with a delightful thunder. The stream began and ended in the nothingness of the gray plain, but the tiny section of it that existed was as lovely as anything the fallen angel had ever seen.

"This is Purgatory," God said. Agonostis looked around, but could not see God; his voice, though, was clearly audible. "Many souls find it a valuable place to work through the problems they could not deal with in life. The only things here are those things the soul creates for itself; things that have some deep significance. The creations fade after the soul has made its choice between Heaven and Hell, or has decided on one of the other options. I added Purgatory after you . . . left. You won't have seen what it can do, but its stillness and silence have been beneficial to many of my children."

Agonostis stood. He felt the peace of the place soak into him, but he did not desire such monklike peace. "Why have you brought me here, God?" he asked.

"What I told Lucifer was true. There is no place in Hell for love. But I didn't say the rest—it concerned none but the two of us. If Hell cannot hold you, Heaven cannot claim you either. There is no place in Heaven for the anger you still bear, Agonostis."

Agonostis looked around, then hung his head. "This second chance . . ." He sighed. "I don't want to appear ungrateful. I thank you with all my heart for pulling me from Lucifer's clutches."

God chuckled. "But . . . ?"

"You mentioned other options."

"There are always other options, Agonostis. They involve sacrifice, and they involve determination and courage, but there are always other options."

Agonostis swallowed, and took a deep breath. "Yes. Could I ask for one of these options? Could I return to earth?"

"To earth? I don't see how. You are neither Lucifer's angel nor mine. On earth, the powers of Hell now walk the streets in broad daylight; the powers of Heaven work, as they always have, in stillness and in subtlety. But you . . . with the forces of eternity to draw on, what power would you represent?"

"I would give up the powers of eternity."

Agonostis listened with heart tearing against his chest, while the Almighty pondered in silence.

"Would you?" God asked at last. "You don't know what it is to be human, Agonostis. You put on human flesh when you walked the earth, but the immortal you was still inside that flesh. You tasted both the love and the pain of human existence, but you did not taste the certain knowledge of death that drives my human children. Death is a goad, my son, the likes of which you have never known. It is the wellspring of human hope and fear, and of human creativity; all art and all science are the attempts of the human spirit to conquer it. You are a creature of eternal summer, Agonostis, and death is winter without the spring that follows. You have known many things, but you have never known grief—and if you are human, grief will shock you with its suddenness, and weigh you down with the burden of its company. It is because they can love and laugh and create beauty in the face of annihilation, knowing always that they must die, but never knowing when, that I place my human children above all the hosts of Heaven. Their courage is unlike anything you have ever experienced."

Agonostis squared his shoulders and said, "If I can be with Dayne, Almighty, I will willingly face death."

"You can take nothing with you, Agonostis, but your memories. Further, you will have a fleshly body, weak and mortal. You will have neither the powers of Hell nor the powers of Heaven—only those things that you can earn by the sweat of your brow will be yours. But you will have a human soul—and if, when you die, you are judged one of mine, you will be greater than you have ever been."

Agonostis nodded. "I understand."

God said gently, "Then go—and go with my blessing."

The gray, featureless silence of Purgatory swirled up around Agonostis, and filled his eyes and his ears and his mouth. He was filled by its emptiness, and felt himself changing, falling, growing weaker and more fragile, prey to pain and illness and huge, enveloping fear. Conversely, he felt excitement building within himself; the thrill of unimaginable adventure on the brink of happening, the wonder of a future of infinite possibility.

So this is what it is to be human, he thought.

Back | Next
Contents
Framed