At the very same time a bolt of lightning came down from the heavens, straight as an arrow and bright as a comet.
Blade and bolt struck the Exarch.
For a breathtaking moment, Lucifer saw only Azazel’s face, made diaphonous by the pure crackling energy. The Exarch’s features twisted with fury, and with his firelit eyes he was the epitome of the devil of human lore.
The impact lifted Lucifer off his feet, tearing his vestige from his hands. He was catapulted through the rain shower, the water made warm by the heat of the explosion. Over and over he tumbled, head over heels, until he had no idea which way was up. He struck something that shattered with his weight. With all the sounds of breakage, of glass and crockery and other delicate things, it seemed he’d collided with a damned butler’s pantry. Blinking, Lucifer rocked onto his knees.
The sun shower shifted to a downpour.
‘So it is to be a flood again.’ He shaded his eyes against the heavy rain as he searched for a sign of Azazel, and his own vestige. ‘I suppose it could be worse.’
The lord would drown all in this place, as he had done when he cleansed the Earth after the rebellion. Lucifer would be exempt as Wrath’s herald, of course, but he abhorred being drenched, and despised swimming. Best to leave sooner rather than later.
He touched a hand down, intending to push to his feet. One of the things broken by his landing lay nearby. A small wire cage that looked to have had an insert of glass once. That glass was shattered now, but the cage still held a tiny prisoner. A very unsteady will-o’-the-wisp. Lucifer had the vague sense that he knew this creature. The wisp was barely the size of two walnuts staked atop one another, but smooth like glass and near as pretty in its rainbow of colours as the simurgh had been. At thought of the beautiful Cultivation, Lucifer’s pulse grew rampant. He’d not heard the strike of more lightning yet. Perhaps…
The wisp came at him, raindrops exploding in tiny fireworks of liquid as they met the creature’s hardened surface. It held up tiny plump green fists in a boxer’s stance, squeaking its blue lungs out in the hope of threatening someone a hundred times its size.
‘Enough of that.’ Gods knew why but Lucifer swept up the tiny fragment of rainbow and thrust the wisp into his pocket. ‘Behave.’
Another shock of lightning came, this one barely a few feet from where he stood. The wisp squealed, and the air hummed with static.
‘A bit damned close.’
By all accounts he should be safe from Wrath. But then, he wasn’t supposed to be standing in the middle of its damned playground either.
Lucifer glanced about. All was made hazy by the stiffly-falling rain, but with much of the topiary now levelled, he soon made out the the bright yellow doors of the entranceway.
‘Right then. Time to leave.’
Lucifer took a step. Just one.
Before he turned around.
‘Need the vestige, that is all.’
That was what he told himself as he retraced his steps, with the wisp bellyaching in his pocket, trying to climb free.
‘Stay down.’
His growl kept the creature still.
The very first thing he laid eyes on was the body of the Archangel. And it was very much a body now, not a grievously-injured angel. Lightning had struck Gabriel, and he looked much like the Valkyrie when they first brought her into Cumberland House, only here there was far less moaning and groaning. His wings were just scorch marks, reduced to a thin layer of ash by Wrath’s strike. Lucifer nudged his boot at the angel’s hip. What had seemed solid fell away, dust to dust, as the purebreds liked to say.
The traitor had paid his dues.
Lucifer moved his attention on from the angel he’d barely said two words to in several thousand years. Gabriel had cared little for him, and he in turn for the angel.
The huge obsidian mirror had shattered. Now it existed in great chunks that were scattered and smoking all over the stone floor. Several of the pieces had melted, rehardening into broad black puddles. And it was in one of these puddles that a gruesome trophy lay. What remained of Azazel’s arm was encased; several fingers, another chunkier piece of flesh that must have come from his forearm. A smattering of shining diamonds surrounded the macabre pieces. The lord had taken no chances here. Azazel’s halo had not survived. But the angel himself had. And Lucifer doubted they’d be so lucky for an amputation to put an end to the Exarch’s hunger for domination.
He shifted on quickly from the remnants of an angel.
They were not what he searched for to begin with.
The rain fell in a steady, monotonous drum, and he moved beneath an unseen umbrella, shielded from its saturation.
Lucifer found the cage, several feet away. Crumpled beneath a mirror edge, a shard of gilded gold and blackness. His heart stilled. The cage was ordinary now. With Gabriel’s halo defunct and no longer embellishing it with any grandeur. This was a flimsy, albeit pretty, assembly of wood and gilded columns.
The wisp shot from his pocket, evading a halfhearted attempt at capture and raced ahead of him. Their rainbow light shone bright, and Lucifer caught sight of the simurgh amongst the tangle of broken wood. It was mostly hidden by the chunk of broken glass. Its colours were duller than Lucifer recalled, but not so faded as he feared he’d find. A wing shifted, slid back from where it had covered the creature’s finer head.
