As he watched, she leapt over incoming waves and twirled, laughing with her wet robes swirling around her.
“Haha! Yes!” Luc cheered, forgetting he was somewhere he was not supposed to be. If Lila visited Earth in the future, then it would definitely be created. With renewed excitement, Luc pocketed Lila’s crystal, certain that no one would miss it, and retrieved his own crystal from the wall.
This was it! The moment he’d been waiting his entire existence for! He braced himself to see everything he’d imagined take solid, physical shape. Canopies of trees. Clusters of stars. Corals and cliffs, canyons and coasts. The full magnificence of a universe only he could have designed!
He braced himself, but he did not brace himself enough.
Indeed, he was not prepared at all for what he saw, which was not a scene of Earth but of Heaven.
Heaven, crumbling—its very ground splitting, fire raining from the sky, thick black smoke covering everything. A battle, raging overhead. Angels slashing each other with swords and hurling each other into the Void. Piles of bodies. Piles of rubble. Shattered windows and splintered frames. And blood, so much blood he didn’t know what it meant.
He wanted to tear his eyes away, but he could only stare in helpless, numb horror.
He watched angels who had worked side by side, aeon after aeon, take up weapons against each other. He watched aeons of architecture destroyed in an instant. In the time it took him to blink.
And there he was at the center of it. The last of the vision.
He watched Michael plunge his sword into his body. Watched himself fall to the platform at the South Edge. Watched a golden light rip itself from his chest. Watched himself stop breathing.
Saw the end of everything he knew.
Present Aeon
The last person Lila expected to see when she opened her front door was Adrianna, but there the elusive angel stood, shifting on her feet like she expected Lila to shut the door in her face.
“I want to talk to you. Is Castor here?”
“No. He’s off with Beni.”
“Good.” Adrianna swept past her, and Lila had no choice but to kick her out or shut the heavy oak door behind her.
She shut the door.
“What can I do for you?” Lila studied her old classmate, whom she saw infrequently now. During lessons, Adrianna used to play pranks behind the instructors’ backs. She’d had a bubbly, dramatic persona back then, but now, she’d gathered her lustrous black hair into a high, tight bun and minimized the makeup on her light brown skin. Her lazy smirk had hardened to a scowl. The sparkle in her eyes that had once promised mischief now promised retribution of a colder kind.
“Have you decided to patch things up with Eva?” Lila ventured when Adrianna didn’t answer. Her old friend was studying the small, one room house Lila shared with Castor like she hadn’t been there hundreds of times.
There was nothing to see, really. Nothing had changed. There was the blue cotton velvet chaise where Castor drank wine. And the oak frame bed where Lila tolerated his awkward humping and loud snoring. And, lastly, thesmall wooden desk where she kept her metalworking designs and creations. Lila sat at this desk and tinkered with her drawings while she waited, again, for Adrianna’s answer. She was working on a special design request from a fellow carpenter: a set of two gold hair pins with leaf tassels that dangled from clusters of porcelain flowers studded with diamonds and pearls.
When Adrianna spoke, it wasn’t of Eva.
“I have a proposition for you,” she began, “but you cannot speak of it to anyone. Do I have your word?”
Lila raised her eyebrows.
“Does Eva know about this?”
“Eva is irrelevant to this conversation.”
“I remember a time when Eva was relevant to every conversation, whether or not she actually was.” Lila chuckled.
“Do you want to hear this opportunity or not?” Adrianna snapped. Her voice rent the aether like a blade splitting skin. “Unless you’d rather stay in woodworking for your entire existence. I thought you hated it.”
Lila blinked.
“Why would I be leaving?”
Adrianna glanced through the peephole of the door as though she expected someone to be outside listening. Then she bent over, placed one hand on Lila’s desk, and whispered, “There’s a faction interested in the removal of the Council and the setup of a new government, one with freedom of choice. You could beanythingyou want to be, even an architect.”
