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“Dona!” He shouted her name. At first he only heard silence. Then he wished for silence.
It was a moaning, like a lonesome wind through a dark forest at night, only there was no wind, no forest. A tide of voices rising in a discordant symphony of despair, the keening punctuated by the occasional shriek of agony. The sound people made when fear overcame every rational thought so all that was left was the unstoppable need to scream.
“Dona!” He roared it, moving forward, stumbling blindly. “She didn’t do anything wrong. It was me, my fault. Leave her alone
. Dona, dammit, where are you?” He fell, caught himself with a hand, felt rock stab his palm, but more importantly, he noted his fingers fluttered over nothing. He was on the edge of something and it was from that chasm the wailing was coming. It was far away, but not so far that the despair couldn’t blast him like the heat of a furnace. Everything in him told him to back away, to scramble from that precipice. But Dona could be there. Dona might need him.
Snarling, he charged forward before he could lose his sense of direction. Intending to leap into open space, instead he yelped in surprise when he came up short, rammed hard into a surface like a brick wall that rapped him smartly on the forehead. It made him stagger back, his senses spinning.
“She’s not there. Granted, she cheated there at the end, but since it was a compulsion of her heart, it was not a true deception. She wanted to let you understand your true self, even if for only a moment. I’m not inclined to punish her for that. It was an act of Fate. I suspect that my Lady’s stubborn, meddling and yet usually right Will was also somehow involved. For you see, only your soul mate can bring your soul to the surface with a kiss. ”
Nathan blinked to find his surroundings had become illuminated. He was on a cliff top, a pillar of rock surrounded on all sides by an open chasm. The light came from a fire-like glow that emitted from the chasm, as if they floated on a sea of embers.
The voice came from a man squatting on bare feet not more than ten feet from him.
“Man” came to Nathan’s mind only because of His form. While the man rested on His knuckles in a familiar, mundane pose, the energy pulsing from Him was overwhelming, such that Nathan could do no more than obey the compulsion of his trembling legs to fall to his knees.
It was the light he had felt inside Dona, only this was the source, her light like the gift of one of its rays.
The man had pale skin, almost a silk-gray in the light. His long dark hair fell snarled over broad shoulders, the strands tangling in the upper curve of the gray silver-white feathered wings that were half spread, balancing Him, as much a part of His body as a bird’s.
When He rose, His height was equal to Nathan’s, but Nathan knew the stature of the Being before him had no ceiling. His form was merely convenient. He could not find the strength to rise to his feet before Him. There was no room for rational thought and therefore no room for deception. There was only emotion, pure raw. All that seemed to matter now was how badly he’d fucked up everything and how much he missed Dona.
Needed her, even though he didn’t deserve even to have a memory of her.
“We…belong together. ” Saying the words was a comfort. It was the only response he had the strength to manage.
“Since the beginning of time. ” Lucifer nodded, considering him. Nathan felt the terrible power in that look, underscored by the disturbing keening still rising up from the flames, more muted now. “But the time has to be right. You’ve found your soul again, with her help. But it doesn’t absolve the crime. It does not pay your karmic debt.
You haven’t been fully redeemed, now have you?”
It flitted through him again, what he’d felt in her arms, joined with her. The shadows that represented the rage and darkness of his soul. The guilt at the things he’d done. The inability to forgive.
“That’s not Dona’s failing, though she’ll think it is. If I returned you to Purgatory in a new body, you’re likely to let the same fears guide your actions. If you met her in mortal life, you could destroy her as you have destroyed others. ” But I need her now…
It was what his soul cried out, the soul that had begged for his mother.
What’s behind the mirror?
No Dona now. Nothing but himself to answer the question. So what was the answer?
On his knees before what he knew was the Power behind everything, it was all as clear and simple as a mirror, ironically. The final true reflection was undeniable, like the feel of rain pounding on his skin. Dona had broken him down, broken him open. With this Being’s power pouring into those raw wounds, truth came bubbling up like pus out of an infection. It was pathetic, a cliché. It wasn’t that he hadn’t always known it. It was the difference between hearing and knowing.
He knew what Dona’s husband had thrown away, because he’d thrown it away a dozen times. But for the first time he felt the actual weight of all the things he’d been offered and spurned. A weight that had grown so gradually over time he hadn’t realized everything he thought he was had been disintegrating beneath the tonnage, damaged beyond even Dona’s ability to repair.
In the depths of his heart, he still believed women were evil. They had a power in them to make a man love them so much, but they would turn on him, use his love against him. Every time Dona had given him some slack, it had reared its head in him again, the need to teach them how it felt, his own brand of karmic justice. Rejecting every woman just as she gave him her love. Always wishing he could find his mother, do it to her. As if the vicious bitch had love to give. He would have done anything to keep her love. To not be abandoned to the demonic creatures that had masqueraded as his foster mothers.
He closed his eyes, bowed his head.
Look in the mirror. Look behind your mother and what do you see? What do you see, Nathan?
As an unloved and unwanted child, he’d started spinning those mirrors early. Now he was a man unworthy of a woman’s love, a creation of his own making, full of anger and bitterness that he’d coated in charm and deception. All he wanted was for one woman to prove him wrong. To tear away all his weapons and shields, beat him to his knees before her, prove to him that he had no need of weapons or shields. Not with her.
But she had done it, hadn’t she? Dona had done it. She could force him to trust, because he couldn’t make the choice himself.
“Life has to be about that choice, or it isn’t earned. ” A new energy, like the Lord before him, but different. Different and yet together.
He’d felt hints of both of Them in Dona’s light. In that one touch, that one soft sentence, he crumbled to the rock, weeping. For now he felt a Mother’s love, felt it as it was meant to be. Unconditional. Forgiving, even while administering justice. Always there.
