Chapter Thirty

The years that followed weren't as simple and smooth as I had hoped.

Upon my return from Duat, Lillian gave birth to her son, Akin. In her native tongue, it meant "angel of light". How strangely appropriate, given the things I'd seen in my visions from the Source. Unfortunately, Lillian's time with Lucifer was cut short. When she returned to Lucifer's side, he'd begun to feed regularly once more and her body had weakened severely since Akin's birth. Her death would quickly approach like Delilah's had. To save herself, and her son, Lillian left the palace... and took Akin with her, leaving Lucifer to once more fall to pieces.

I understood why Lillian had done what she did. She was protecting her son and she didn't want Akin to be without a mother, as she had been growing up. Though every instinct in my being screamed at me to keep Akin here where I was certain he belonged, the Source thought otherwise and I felt it. So Akin was taken away.

Meanwhile, Hell had officially been deemed one of the realms, owned and ruled by Lucifer himself. During the first years of his reign, he formed treaties with not only Duat and Mictlan, but also Heaven, the very place that had rejected Lucifer in the first place. The idea had come as a shock to many, even the archangels themselves that had come on behalf of their God. The archangels, Michael and Bethany, came forth with negotiations to form a deal in which Lucifer would accept damned souls and souls rejected from Heaven.

Of course, Lucifer only agreed if the idea of a purgatory was put into a place. A realm in which souls would be given one final chance to determine their worthiness to enter hell, or simply walk purgatory until their redemption was found and they could become a citizen of Hell.

At the time this was implemented, Lucifer had four children; Jaques, Thorn, Bali, and Wednesday. He'd chosen his son, Thorn, to take control of purgatory. He was rather young at the time, but quiet and well-mannered, and certainly understanding of a soul's plight. His mother had been a servant within the palace, before perishing after Lucifer's fourth feeding. Bali and Wednesday's mother was, but a mere mortal who'd called out to him for help in vengeance, and a pact was made between the two, thus resulting in the twins.

After the archangels departed from Hell, and the realm fell into a strange peace for several years, something rocked the universe at that point. I could feel the sharp pains in my chest, the headaches, the visions the Source threw at me to reveal to me what the universe was doing to cause such unbalance.

The Greeks. They were once more warring amongst themselves, but it had taken a devastating turn, resulting in the deaths of gods and mortals alike.

Worse still, the archangel Bethany returned to Hell with an unnamed infant. With eyes flaring with hatred and venom dripping from her lips, she'd thrust the child at Lucifer, spat upon his shoes, and vanished from sight. Lucifer immediately took the babe, the babe he had conceived with Bethany in a moment of weakness, and he named the child Raven, for his hair was as dark as the night upon which Bethany appeared.

And for a century or so longer, the war between the Greeks raged and shook the universe, threw the balance into disarray, infuriated the Source to where it took no mercy in throwing visions about my skull like a thousand fireworks.

I dreamt of the god Hades from that vision so long ago, but he'd become older. There was a cold sternness to him, until he was faced with his siblings, his features softened and his heart warmed at their presence, and now joining them was... someone new.

I could not see their features at the time. The Source refused to give me the face of the final sibling, but I'd heard rumors that his name was Zeus, and the name abruptly woke me with laughter at a name so old, I'd nearly forgotten it. A god named Zeus? Certainly befitting.

And the dreams continued, in flashes mainly. I dreamt of the Savior, now older, now more scarred, now colder, hateful, angry, hurt, and tired of crying out in pain, crying out for help. And how my heart bled that I could do nothing but watch his suffering, watch as he cut a path of blood and murder in an attempt to numb himself of the pain that burned deep inside him. And all it did was feed the beast inside him, the beast that became fat and greedy on the misery burning through the Savior's blood.

I dreamt of the Savior's hero, Akin. I dream of him dancing with his mother, dreamt of Lillian swatting him on the backside for cheating in classes, dreamt of her weeping as she held him while he clutched a bloodied nose, a smile still on his face through the blood.

I dreamt of the lives I'd unintentionally destroyed and touched in the past, due to the unleashed fury buried deep within my soul. I dreamt of tears and screams, of blood and carnage, of fury and unrelenting fear.

And the turmoil caused by the inner pantheon wars ceased suddenly. As if the Source had finally intervened, but that wasn't possible. The Source could never lift a finger to help its inhabitants, not nearly as much as it wished to.

Yet it was such a sudden screeching halt.

And life began to move at a steady, safe pace once more.

With it came another child to Lucifer's life, a precious daughter, Dania. As the tragedy in Lucifer's life spoke, however, Dania's mother perished as Jaques's, as Thorn's. She died in her sleep only a year after Dania's birth.

And I sat at Lucifer's side while he cradled his daughter while she slept through the night. I watched those tears pool into his eyes, causing them to shimmer in the softly glowing bulb nearby, watched them spill free of his lashes, and run down his cheeks. He swept them away quickly, however, to keep them from touching his precious daughter's face.

"I can't do this anymore," Lucifer choked as I sat upon the nightstand nearby, in the form I'd become accustomed to taking since the Pantheon Wars, a large white snake, "St. John, I can't do this anymore. It won't matter who I love and how much, in the end, they're all going to end up the same." My heart ached for him, and I moved from my place upon the table, slithering down across the floor before climbing up the back of his chair to drape my head and body over his shoulders in an attempt to comfort him. I flicked my tongue out, caught his tears, finding them to taste much like battery acid.

"I can't fall in love anymore, St. John. I just can't. I can't keep killing people for selfish reasons," he whispered. His words were more to convince himself, because we both knew Lucifer would one day fall in love once more. His heart was too gentle, too open, too loving, to reject the temptation of true love's warm embrace. I said nothing, however, allowed him to whisper the vow.

Which he carried out for the next few centuries.

His final child came from a series of experimental procedures to create what was known as "artificials", or creatures created from nothing more than a demented combination of science and magic. The procedure had been invented by the god Hades, though, the idea had been known for centuries. It just took several centuries for the idea of science to become integrated, and Hades was very well known for his affiliation with the scientific community.

Lucifer named his final creation Alaric. Though mildly unstable and created as a child, Alaric grew up in the same manner as his siblings. Happy, fun-loving, and very attached to his siblings, particularly Raven.

And so the Luciferian family was complete.

Until a dark night when I lay down to sleep after a day of working with Lucifer and his children to perfect an already well known and respected realm. As I lay my head down on the plush cotton pillow, rolling over to my side, eyes closing. I was struck by an abrupt vision of torrential rain, and sudden fear that had me gasping almost immediately.

I found myself cold and wet and terrified for reasons I didn't comprehend. One moment, I was laying in bed, and the next I was running through trees. My foot caught on something hard, a tree root given my surroundings of only trees for what appeared to be miles... until I flew through the air and landed in something sticky and heavy... mud.

The vision shuddered, and I could hear someone gasping and crying out in vain. I reached through the mud, grasping for whoever was trapped with me, but I was abruptly dropped from the pocket of thick sticky mud and found myself staring down at a quaint old little town by the seaside, the sea I recognized as the Black Sea, and upon closer inspection... the little city state called Inferi, on the other side of the Black Sea from Lucifer's palace.

I woke up with a sharp gasp, shooting upright in bed, blinking rapidly. Immediately the lights around me turned on, the Tiffany lamps on the bedside flickering to life and the chandelier in the center of the room glinting off the clean white marble floors. A shudder rushed through me, a chill licking its way up my spine. I swallowed hard, closed my eyes, listened to the sounds around me.

The faint hum of electricity around me. The whispered rush of black ocean waves rising up from an endless abyss outside, then crashing against the cliffside upon which the palace sat for thousands of years. My breath came in soft inhales as I steadied my breath, focused on the way my heart beat quickly, then abruptly came to a slow thrum in my chest. I reached up, placing my hand over it, listening to all the sounds in the room for several minutes, letting them blend together in one long buzzing sound that became the Source's whispered warning.

Everything is about to change.

It's going to begin here. Tonight.

This is it, I realized, another chill sweeping through me as I opened my eyes and stared across the room out the balcony where the long chocolate colored drapes fluttered in the gentle wind.

The time has finally come. Everything I'd been waiting for all these years, centuries, fucking millennia. It was finally being pushed into motion. All the visions the Source had breathed into me over the nights were finally going to begin to make sense to me. I was going to meet the Savior soon, Akin, this infamous Hades.

Atlan.

I sucked in a sharp breath as the Source pulsed suddenly, the sensation of it so strong my head snapped back and I parted my lips to draw in air, but it was stolen from my lungs as the Source screamed and I shut my eyes, shouting in pain as the scream echoed through my skull and nearly shattered it on my shoulders.

It's coming!

The Second Great War was coming.

The war that would decide everything.

The very fate of the universe, the Source, and all living things.

The time is now!

End Part One >>>