Original -- The Burning Ones
Title: The Burning Ones
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,819
Warnings: language, relatively mild violence with flaming swords
Prompt: The Pretender at pulped_fictions
Summary: The Archangel Michael catches up.
Author's Note: Since finishing FMA, every time I sit down to write, it's like, "This needs more swords! And more guns! And more magic!", which is sabotaging me constantly. XD Anyway, enjoy a rather different side of Maion… This scene will probably appear in the actual novel - by this point, it's come out that Michael is Maion's older(/bigger/greater) brother, and he is not happy about all of the shenanigans Maion's been part of recently. Shit just got real, yo! My apologies if I missed things editing; much of this was written during a two-hour-turned-six-hour train journey while I was moving house yesterday, and the internet thingy we bought today only works on my boyfriend's computer so far. That said, let me know what you think about it technically so that the ~final version~ ends up shinier. ♥
What if I say I'm not like the others?
What if I say I'm not just another
One of your plays-you're the pretender
What if I say I will never surrender?
- "The Pretender" - The Foo Fighters -
And beg
You will beg
You will beg for their lives and their souls
And burn
You will burn
You will burn in hell, yeah, you'll burn in hell
You'll burn in hell, yeah, you'll burn in hell
For your sins
- "Take a Bow" - Muse -
THE BURNING ONES
They were so close that Maion could smell it-could taste the sparking current of potential, of anticipation. Finally, after all of the false starts, all of the dead-ends, all of the failures of every shape and size, they were here, and they were close. These London side-streets wound and intertwined like a nest of snakes, but there was nothing that even this storied city could do to stop them now.
Maion’s heart was jittering in his chest, and his pulse was singing in his ears, and the sigil on his palm ached almost gently, throbbing in time, marking their progress beat by beat. Belial, unsurprisingly, had a way of making even a full-tilt sprint look lazy, but it didn’t matter; the night was cool, the sky flecked with gleams of white, the cobblestones slick and shining under the intermittent streetlights. Edward was panting with his tongue out, keeping pace with the immortals-compelled to, by the literally-dogged determination that fit so snugly around the genuine kindness at his core. Vincent’s trenchcoat billowed theatrically, strands of his dark hair slipping from their ponytail to curve across his cheekbones, his sharp eyes the color of the night. It was almost a pity that they were just minutes from the graveyard now, because Maion wouldn’t have minded if this-the running, the racing, the unity established by their single goal-had gone on forever.
“This way!” he cried, swinging heedlessly around the corner into the corridor that would bring them out of the alleyways and back onto a thoroughfare.
Then he stopped.
At the mouth of the alley stood a tall man with pale blond hair and dark brown eyes. He looked sad-sad in a way that human beings could barely understand.
Maion’s mouth went dry. His heart seized, his knees locked, and his stomach twisted into an impenetrable knot. Bile burned his throat, and for a moment he heard only the distant roar inside his skull, a soundless scream of No, no, no, not now-
His voice emerged from between his trembling lips as nothing more than a whisper:
“Michael.”
“This is my fault,” Michael said, and the sad eyes held Maion’s like a vise, so tightly that he forgot to breathe. “It’s my fault that you’ve strayed.”
Everything in Maion was hot and roiling, flames and fear and shame and light-and then something hardened and froze.
“This has nothing to do with you,” he said. “I’m exactly where I need to be.”
“I should have taught you better,” Michael said, as if he hadn’t heard; this wouldn’t be the first time his ageless heart had gone deaf. “It was my responsibility to ensure that you could distinguish right from wrong.”
“It isn’t wrong,” Maion insisted, stumbling a half-step forward as the warmth of the eagerness flooded through him all at once. “Listen to me. I’m not straying at all; it’s a plot for destruction, and we’re stopping it; the necr-”
“You’ve disobeyed all of your orders,” Michael said quietly, and it wasn’t just sadness now-it was pity. “You’ve shirked your duties and fled from the Light in favor of bizarre and desperate conduct here below. You’ve turned away. I’m sorry. It’s too late. You’re past the point of excuses and intentions now. I live in hope that we can repair this, but you have to come back. You have to come with me.”
Maion had strolled through millennia, but he could still feel every second as it passed. He could almost hear them, almost touch them-tiny grains of sand dropping from his fingertips, coating the vast beaches he’d crossed to reach this moment. Everything before, eons and epochs, had funneled its power into this solitary gasp of breath.
Into this choice.
In the beginning, the Word had created truth and tangibility, dimension and direction, physicality and form. In the beginning, the Word had built everything, and the fledgling universe had been a paradise for the boundless energy of new Quintessence. In the beginning, the Word made him.
This word would end him.
“No,” he said.
“What?” Michael’s eyes widened first, and then they narrowed to slits. “Look at yourself. Look at the company you keep.”
“It’s the company I chose,” Maion said. He hesitated, and then he gestured towards Belial. “Except him; he’s kind of part of the package deal.”
Pain flashed across Michael’s face, bright and brief, and Maion braced himself for the thunder.
He wasn’t waiting long.
The streetlamps buzzed loudly and then blinked out. The whole street plunged into shadow; the world went dark except for Michael’s eyes, which started burning white.
“Maion,” he said, and all other sounds died. “Come with me.”
Maion took a deep breath and focused on opening himself, on rerouting a portion of his essence outside of this body’s enclosure. A blue-white ribbon arced across his chest, slender at first and then thickening, the bulk of the light condensing against his back. He filled his lungs again, emptied them, and solidified the agitated energy into the sheath, the baldric, the broadsword.
He drew it smoothly, and pale blue flame engulfed the blade. His hands stopped shaking when he clenched them around the hilt.
“Michael,” he said. “Get out of my way.”
Such sadness. Such incredible pain. The kind of heartbreak that would kill a lesser being. Weary resignation.
And then the fire.
“You did this,” Michael said. “Remember that. Remember who’s to blame.”
Maion wasn’t terribly concerned with remembering, given that he’d be dead in minutes flat. He just hoped that Vincent and Edward had enough time-and enough wits between them-to run for their brief, beautiful lives.
Michael summoned his sword, blinding white against the night, in a quarter of the time. Maion spared a moment to wonder whether it was all proportional, and Michael was approximately three times stronger in every aspect-but again, it didn’t particularly matter, because he was about to die.
Somehow he had the sense to hurl himself forward and strike first, if only to put a little more space between his fragile-bodied friends and the imminent firestorm.
Michael parried effortlessly and with sufficient force to send a tremor shuddering back down Maion’s arms. This was shaping up to be a rather short encounter.
But maybe-he had to buy more time, and maybe-
Maion swung again, trying to sustain the momentum moving away from his friends, even if there was no chance he’d keep the upper hand.
Maybe-the blades clashed together, and sparks leapt from the point of contact to join the flames; skirting Michael’s blows sent him circling, reversing their positions-maybe if he just changed the game every time Michael started winning, he could stay a little ways ahead.
He made a heedless swipe at Michael’s head, angling the arc of the sword downward, and Michael jumped back out of range, all smooth, pale, graceful lines. The distance created a delay-one just long enough for Maion to bring out all three pairs of wings.
White flames flared higher as Michael lunged for him, but Maion hurled himself back and up, glancing over his shoulder just in time to adjust his trajectory and land perched on the frame of the awning above a greengrocer. The wood creaked under his weight despite his efforts to lessen the impact with his wings, and he dropped instinctively into a crouch, touching his fingertips to the rough canvas for balance. There was a moment to look behind himself again, to judge distances and calculate speeds, and then Michael had left the ground with all six wings open, trailed by spitting white flames like the tail of a comet.
I’m sorry, Maion thought sincerely, directing the sentiment at the soul of whoever owned this building. I’m terribly sorry.
As Michael soared towards him in a blaze of of blinding white fire, he launched himself backwards, rolling in the air so that his feet smashed through the second-story window.
The room was empty-deserted, in fact; the closest things to furniture were broken crates and piles of dust, and he could sense the tiny souls of a family of mice. His sword and Michael’s outside provided more than enough light to illuminate a door from which the paint was peeling off in strips, and he threw himself at it.
He’d been hoping it would slam open, or that there would at least be some dramatic splintering of rotted boards, but it didn’t even budge.
“Bad door,” Maion said.
Then he stabbed his sword through the lock, celestial fire melting the metal and carving through the wood as if it were gelatin. There wasn’t time to think about door-shaped Jell-O molds, however-more was the pity-because the shards of glass left clinging to the window-frame exploded inwards as Michael blasted through.
Maion was out in the hall, spotting the stairs-pale blue cast strange shadows on the narrow walls; he had to angle his sword carefully lest he set the wallpaper on fire-surging up the well-worn steps, catching the banister to keep from falling as he slung himself around the curve to the next flight…
Four stories. No roof access; this was as high as he could go. Oh… darn. Darnity darn dar-
This was like some kind of ghost flat, silent and carpeted with dust. Maion kicked in the first door of this hall; empty room. Second door; empty. Third. Fourth. The fifth had an old fireplace and a window that looked out at the overgrown backyard.
Maion darted inside, cringed, and then put his sword through the windowpane. He’d always meant to compile an encyclopedia of the properties and effects of celestial fire-it made the glass act like the liquid that it truly was, sloshing to the floor and settling in a puddle of gleaming crystals. Maion could hear Michael’s approaching footfalls, and the proximity of his Quintessence smoldered at the periphery of all of Maion’s senses. He took a breath and grasped the top of the window-frame in his free hand, trying to maneuver the sword out of the way so he could swing through-
He shifted his grip at the precise moment that an iron fire poker buried its point in the wood of the frame, missing his hand-missing impaling his palm and pinning him to the wall-by centimeters. He ducked and scuttled away and then berated himself; it was still the only exit.
“You did this,” Michael said. For a moment the dancing shadows erased his eyes. “This is the path you chose.”
Maion forced his legs to hold him, gripping the sword so tightly that his hands ached. Beads of glass tinkled underneath his feet.
“If this is so hard for you,” he said, and his voice trembled more than he’d hoped, “why don’t you stop?”
His eyes watered; looking at a Revealed Michael directly would have made a human’s bleed.
“You were lost to Mercy a long time ago,” Michael said, lifting his sword so slowly that Maion’s knees twinged twice before it was poised. “That was never my decision; it was yours.”
“You don’t understand!” Maion protested, his heart sounding hard and uneven in his ears. “It wasn’t-it was never a single moment; it was a thousand things, and every time I tried-I tried to do what seemed best for everyone, tried to save people, tried to help-”
“Evidently, you failed,” Michael said. “Cease sniveling like a child and accept the consequences.”
Maion drew another deep breath. “I haven’t failed.” He shifted his feet among the glass. “Not yet, anyway.”
Michael came at him first this time, a whirlwind streak of flashing blade and searing flame. Maion parried high, right, left, high, low, right-dove under a thrust aimed at his heart. He found himself on the floor, old dust and slivers of glass digging themselves into his palms, and rolled over swiftly before he could even orient himself enough to see-there was a rush of heat as Michael’s sword plunged deeply into the boards beside his head.
So deeply that it stuck.
Maion scrambled up, clutching his sword’s hilt in his weakly-bleeding fingers, and flung himself into the fireplace.
I really am sorry, he thought.
Then he summoned all of the fire and air and energy that he could muster and blew it up.
He sailed out of the collapsing chimney like a cannonball and caught the wind with all six wings, slowing the descent so that he drifted down to settle, legs wobbling outright now, on the eaves of the building a few doors down.
“What in the hell is going on?” Vincent shouted, a slash of pure black on the dark street below.
Maion glanced over at the gutted flat from which he’d escaped. It did look a bit incriminating. And a bit singed. A few bricks crumbled, and there was a puff of dust.
Then there was a strong white light.
Michael reemerged like a monumental flashbang, and Maion was deaf and blind and reeling, staggering such that he nearly lost his footing on the roof. He’d almost blinked his streaming eyes clear when something massive slammed into his side, and the shingles vanished from beneath him, and the air dried out instantaneously and screamed past his ears as he plummeted.
Four stories down onto cobblestones.
He arched his aching back off of the damp ground and gasped in a breath, spots of every color twirling before his eyes. A fragment of him clung to his survival instincts, and that fragment made his shaking fingers creep across the cold stones and curl slowly around the pommel of his sword. He wheezed in another breath, writhing against the unremitting pain that thrummed through his spine and seized his hips. If his skull hadn’t split, he’d have to canonize this feeble skeleton for performing a miracle.
The encroaching darkness at the edges of his eyes faded a little. Michael was standing over him, and his eyes were the coldest white that Maion had ever seen.
He spoke just one word-a word from the old language, the oldest language, from before mankind had evolved the vocal cords or even the aspirations for speech.
The single word carried a multiplicity of meanings-fool and forsaken; lost, ending, ruin, rupture. The best translation into English was Fallen.
Michael raised his sword.
But there was a shadow-not a shadow; a man-shaped slice of oblivion, black like suffocation beneath the Earth, with blood-red eyes. The air around it undulated faintly like a heat shimmer as it insinuated itself between them. Looking at it made Maion feel that he’d been hollowed out with carving knives and filled to brimming with despair.
“You’re God’s guard dog,” Belial said. “Aren’t you?”
Michael bared his teeth, but the flames flaring off of his sword just hissed and dwindled into the blacker-than-black space before him. “I am the Vanguard of Heaven, you fil-”
“That’s nice,” Belial said. He gestured to himself with a flourish. “I’m Satan’s right hand. Surely you remember me.”
“I remember banishing you to the Pit where you belo-”
One coal-dust hand shot out and pressed itself to Michael’s chest just over his heart. The inky fingers clenched, and hot, red, regular fire spurted-and then Michael was gone.
Belial grabbed Maion’s wrist before he could rasp out another breath, let alone argue, and hauled him to his unsteady feet.
“Holy fucking shit,” Edward Blevins said faintly. “What the fuck did you just do to the Archangel Michael?”
“I transported him,” Belial said calmly, normal human colors seeping back into his shape and sinking in where they’d rested before. He paused. “To Antarctica. It only worked because he wasn’t expecting it, though, and it won’t hold him off for long.”
Maion stared at the sword hanging from his hand; it felt impossibly heavy. Hadn’t he been swinging it just moments ago?
“All the same, you owe me one, sweetheart,” Belial was saying, apparently to him. “As far as repayment, I accept all forms of currency, although I prefer sexual favors.”
Maion didn’t really register that the sounds had meaning. He sank to his knees on the damp pavement, and the sword dropped from his unfeeling fingers and clattered on the stones; the flames evaporated, leaving just a cooling piece of steel. His head tipped forward, and he gazed down at the little pools of water in the cracks between the stones.
He’d never meant… He’d never thought… He’d just acted and reacted, playing along, and suddenly everything was gone.
He sensed Vincent’s hand moving for his shoulder and dragged himself up to his feet, staggering forward out of reach. He couldn’t. Not now. Compassion would shatter him.
“We’d better keep going,” he said.
He didn’t say There’s no going back.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,819
Warnings: language, relatively mild violence with flaming swords
Prompt: The Pretender at pulped_fictions
Summary: The Archangel Michael catches up.
Author's Note: Since finishing FMA, every time I sit down to write, it's like, "This needs more swords! And more guns! And more magic!", which is sabotaging me constantly. XD Anyway, enjoy a rather different side of Maion… This scene will probably appear in the actual novel - by this point, it's come out that Michael is Maion's older(/bigger/greater) brother, and he is not happy about all of the shenanigans Maion's been part of recently. Shit just got real, yo! My apologies if I missed things editing; much of this was written during a two-hour-turned-six-hour train journey while I was moving house yesterday, and the internet thingy we bought today only works on my boyfriend's computer so far. That said, let me know what you think about it technically so that the ~final version~ ends up shinier. ♥
What if I say I'm not like the others?
What if I say I'm not just another
One of your plays-you're the pretender
What if I say I will never surrender?
- "The Pretender" - The Foo Fighters -
And beg
You will beg
You will beg for their lives and their souls
And burn
You will burn
You will burn in hell, yeah, you'll burn in hell
You'll burn in hell, yeah, you'll burn in hell
For your sins
- "Take a Bow" - Muse -
THE BURNING ONES
They were so close that Maion could smell it-could taste the sparking current of potential, of anticipation. Finally, after all of the false starts, all of the dead-ends, all of the failures of every shape and size, they were here, and they were close. These London side-streets wound and intertwined like a nest of snakes, but there was nothing that even this storied city could do to stop them now.
Maion’s heart was jittering in his chest, and his pulse was singing in his ears, and the sigil on his palm ached almost gently, throbbing in time, marking their progress beat by beat. Belial, unsurprisingly, had a way of making even a full-tilt sprint look lazy, but it didn’t matter; the night was cool, the sky flecked with gleams of white, the cobblestones slick and shining under the intermittent streetlights. Edward was panting with his tongue out, keeping pace with the immortals-compelled to, by the literally-dogged determination that fit so snugly around the genuine kindness at his core. Vincent’s trenchcoat billowed theatrically, strands of his dark hair slipping from their ponytail to curve across his cheekbones, his sharp eyes the color of the night. It was almost a pity that they were just minutes from the graveyard now, because Maion wouldn’t have minded if this-the running, the racing, the unity established by their single goal-had gone on forever.
“This way!” he cried, swinging heedlessly around the corner into the corridor that would bring them out of the alleyways and back onto a thoroughfare.
Then he stopped.
At the mouth of the alley stood a tall man with pale blond hair and dark brown eyes. He looked sad-sad in a way that human beings could barely understand.
Maion’s mouth went dry. His heart seized, his knees locked, and his stomach twisted into an impenetrable knot. Bile burned his throat, and for a moment he heard only the distant roar inside his skull, a soundless scream of No, no, no, not now-
His voice emerged from between his trembling lips as nothing more than a whisper:
“Michael.”
“This is my fault,” Michael said, and the sad eyes held Maion’s like a vise, so tightly that he forgot to breathe. “It’s my fault that you’ve strayed.”
Everything in Maion was hot and roiling, flames and fear and shame and light-and then something hardened and froze.
“This has nothing to do with you,” he said. “I’m exactly where I need to be.”
“I should have taught you better,” Michael said, as if he hadn’t heard; this wouldn’t be the first time his ageless heart had gone deaf. “It was my responsibility to ensure that you could distinguish right from wrong.”
“It isn’t wrong,” Maion insisted, stumbling a half-step forward as the warmth of the eagerness flooded through him all at once. “Listen to me. I’m not straying at all; it’s a plot for destruction, and we’re stopping it; the necr-”
“You’ve disobeyed all of your orders,” Michael said quietly, and it wasn’t just sadness now-it was pity. “You’ve shirked your duties and fled from the Light in favor of bizarre and desperate conduct here below. You’ve turned away. I’m sorry. It’s too late. You’re past the point of excuses and intentions now. I live in hope that we can repair this, but you have to come back. You have to come with me.”
Maion had strolled through millennia, but he could still feel every second as it passed. He could almost hear them, almost touch them-tiny grains of sand dropping from his fingertips, coating the vast beaches he’d crossed to reach this moment. Everything before, eons and epochs, had funneled its power into this solitary gasp of breath.
Into this choice.
In the beginning, the Word had created truth and tangibility, dimension and direction, physicality and form. In the beginning, the Word had built everything, and the fledgling universe had been a paradise for the boundless energy of new Quintessence. In the beginning, the Word made him.
This word would end him.
“No,” he said.
“What?” Michael’s eyes widened first, and then they narrowed to slits. “Look at yourself. Look at the company you keep.”
“It’s the company I chose,” Maion said. He hesitated, and then he gestured towards Belial. “Except him; he’s kind of part of the package deal.”
Pain flashed across Michael’s face, bright and brief, and Maion braced himself for the thunder.
He wasn’t waiting long.
The streetlamps buzzed loudly and then blinked out. The whole street plunged into shadow; the world went dark except for Michael’s eyes, which started burning white.
“Maion,” he said, and all other sounds died. “Come with me.”
Maion took a deep breath and focused on opening himself, on rerouting a portion of his essence outside of this body’s enclosure. A blue-white ribbon arced across his chest, slender at first and then thickening, the bulk of the light condensing against his back. He filled his lungs again, emptied them, and solidified the agitated energy into the sheath, the baldric, the broadsword.
He drew it smoothly, and pale blue flame engulfed the blade. His hands stopped shaking when he clenched them around the hilt.
“Michael,” he said. “Get out of my way.”
Such sadness. Such incredible pain. The kind of heartbreak that would kill a lesser being. Weary resignation.
And then the fire.
“You did this,” Michael said. “Remember that. Remember who’s to blame.”
Maion wasn’t terribly concerned with remembering, given that he’d be dead in minutes flat. He just hoped that Vincent and Edward had enough time-and enough wits between them-to run for their brief, beautiful lives.
Michael summoned his sword, blinding white against the night, in a quarter of the time. Maion spared a moment to wonder whether it was all proportional, and Michael was approximately three times stronger in every aspect-but again, it didn’t particularly matter, because he was about to die.
Somehow he had the sense to hurl himself forward and strike first, if only to put a little more space between his fragile-bodied friends and the imminent firestorm.
Michael parried effortlessly and with sufficient force to send a tremor shuddering back down Maion’s arms. This was shaping up to be a rather short encounter.
But maybe-he had to buy more time, and maybe-
Maion swung again, trying to sustain the momentum moving away from his friends, even if there was no chance he’d keep the upper hand.
Maybe-the blades clashed together, and sparks leapt from the point of contact to join the flames; skirting Michael’s blows sent him circling, reversing their positions-maybe if he just changed the game every time Michael started winning, he could stay a little ways ahead.
He made a heedless swipe at Michael’s head, angling the arc of the sword downward, and Michael jumped back out of range, all smooth, pale, graceful lines. The distance created a delay-one just long enough for Maion to bring out all three pairs of wings.
White flames flared higher as Michael lunged for him, but Maion hurled himself back and up, glancing over his shoulder just in time to adjust his trajectory and land perched on the frame of the awning above a greengrocer. The wood creaked under his weight despite his efforts to lessen the impact with his wings, and he dropped instinctively into a crouch, touching his fingertips to the rough canvas for balance. There was a moment to look behind himself again, to judge distances and calculate speeds, and then Michael had left the ground with all six wings open, trailed by spitting white flames like the tail of a comet.
I’m sorry, Maion thought sincerely, directing the sentiment at the soul of whoever owned this building. I’m terribly sorry.
As Michael soared towards him in a blaze of of blinding white fire, he launched himself backwards, rolling in the air so that his feet smashed through the second-story window.
The room was empty-deserted, in fact; the closest things to furniture were broken crates and piles of dust, and he could sense the tiny souls of a family of mice. His sword and Michael’s outside provided more than enough light to illuminate a door from which the paint was peeling off in strips, and he threw himself at it.
He’d been hoping it would slam open, or that there would at least be some dramatic splintering of rotted boards, but it didn’t even budge.
“Bad door,” Maion said.
Then he stabbed his sword through the lock, celestial fire melting the metal and carving through the wood as if it were gelatin. There wasn’t time to think about door-shaped Jell-O molds, however-more was the pity-because the shards of glass left clinging to the window-frame exploded inwards as Michael blasted through.
Maion was out in the hall, spotting the stairs-pale blue cast strange shadows on the narrow walls; he had to angle his sword carefully lest he set the wallpaper on fire-surging up the well-worn steps, catching the banister to keep from falling as he slung himself around the curve to the next flight…
Four stories. No roof access; this was as high as he could go. Oh… darn. Darnity darn dar-
This was like some kind of ghost flat, silent and carpeted with dust. Maion kicked in the first door of this hall; empty room. Second door; empty. Third. Fourth. The fifth had an old fireplace and a window that looked out at the overgrown backyard.
Maion darted inside, cringed, and then put his sword through the windowpane. He’d always meant to compile an encyclopedia of the properties and effects of celestial fire-it made the glass act like the liquid that it truly was, sloshing to the floor and settling in a puddle of gleaming crystals. Maion could hear Michael’s approaching footfalls, and the proximity of his Quintessence smoldered at the periphery of all of Maion’s senses. He took a breath and grasped the top of the window-frame in his free hand, trying to maneuver the sword out of the way so he could swing through-
He shifted his grip at the precise moment that an iron fire poker buried its point in the wood of the frame, missing his hand-missing impaling his palm and pinning him to the wall-by centimeters. He ducked and scuttled away and then berated himself; it was still the only exit.
“You did this,” Michael said. For a moment the dancing shadows erased his eyes. “This is the path you chose.”
Maion forced his legs to hold him, gripping the sword so tightly that his hands ached. Beads of glass tinkled underneath his feet.
“If this is so hard for you,” he said, and his voice trembled more than he’d hoped, “why don’t you stop?”
His eyes watered; looking at a Revealed Michael directly would have made a human’s bleed.
“You were lost to Mercy a long time ago,” Michael said, lifting his sword so slowly that Maion’s knees twinged twice before it was poised. “That was never my decision; it was yours.”
“You don’t understand!” Maion protested, his heart sounding hard and uneven in his ears. “It wasn’t-it was never a single moment; it was a thousand things, and every time I tried-I tried to do what seemed best for everyone, tried to save people, tried to help-”
“Evidently, you failed,” Michael said. “Cease sniveling like a child and accept the consequences.”
Maion drew another deep breath. “I haven’t failed.” He shifted his feet among the glass. “Not yet, anyway.”
Michael came at him first this time, a whirlwind streak of flashing blade and searing flame. Maion parried high, right, left, high, low, right-dove under a thrust aimed at his heart. He found himself on the floor, old dust and slivers of glass digging themselves into his palms, and rolled over swiftly before he could even orient himself enough to see-there was a rush of heat as Michael’s sword plunged deeply into the boards beside his head.
So deeply that it stuck.
Maion scrambled up, clutching his sword’s hilt in his weakly-bleeding fingers, and flung himself into the fireplace.
I really am sorry, he thought.
Then he summoned all of the fire and air and energy that he could muster and blew it up.
He sailed out of the collapsing chimney like a cannonball and caught the wind with all six wings, slowing the descent so that he drifted down to settle, legs wobbling outright now, on the eaves of the building a few doors down.
“What in the hell is going on?” Vincent shouted, a slash of pure black on the dark street below.
Maion glanced over at the gutted flat from which he’d escaped. It did look a bit incriminating. And a bit singed. A few bricks crumbled, and there was a puff of dust.
Then there was a strong white light.
Michael reemerged like a monumental flashbang, and Maion was deaf and blind and reeling, staggering such that he nearly lost his footing on the roof. He’d almost blinked his streaming eyes clear when something massive slammed into his side, and the shingles vanished from beneath him, and the air dried out instantaneously and screamed past his ears as he plummeted.
Four stories down onto cobblestones.
He arched his aching back off of the damp ground and gasped in a breath, spots of every color twirling before his eyes. A fragment of him clung to his survival instincts, and that fragment made his shaking fingers creep across the cold stones and curl slowly around the pommel of his sword. He wheezed in another breath, writhing against the unremitting pain that thrummed through his spine and seized his hips. If his skull hadn’t split, he’d have to canonize this feeble skeleton for performing a miracle.
The encroaching darkness at the edges of his eyes faded a little. Michael was standing over him, and his eyes were the coldest white that Maion had ever seen.
He spoke just one word-a word from the old language, the oldest language, from before mankind had evolved the vocal cords or even the aspirations for speech.
The single word carried a multiplicity of meanings-fool and forsaken; lost, ending, ruin, rupture. The best translation into English was Fallen.
Michael raised his sword.
But there was a shadow-not a shadow; a man-shaped slice of oblivion, black like suffocation beneath the Earth, with blood-red eyes. The air around it undulated faintly like a heat shimmer as it insinuated itself between them. Looking at it made Maion feel that he’d been hollowed out with carving knives and filled to brimming with despair.
“You’re God’s guard dog,” Belial said. “Aren’t you?”
Michael bared his teeth, but the flames flaring off of his sword just hissed and dwindled into the blacker-than-black space before him. “I am the Vanguard of Heaven, you fil-”
“That’s nice,” Belial said. He gestured to himself with a flourish. “I’m Satan’s right hand. Surely you remember me.”
“I remember banishing you to the Pit where you belo-”
One coal-dust hand shot out and pressed itself to Michael’s chest just over his heart. The inky fingers clenched, and hot, red, regular fire spurted-and then Michael was gone.
Belial grabbed Maion’s wrist before he could rasp out another breath, let alone argue, and hauled him to his unsteady feet.
“Holy fucking shit,” Edward Blevins said faintly. “What the fuck did you just do to the Archangel Michael?”
“I transported him,” Belial said calmly, normal human colors seeping back into his shape and sinking in where they’d rested before. He paused. “To Antarctica. It only worked because he wasn’t expecting it, though, and it won’t hold him off for long.”
Maion stared at the sword hanging from his hand; it felt impossibly heavy. Hadn’t he been swinging it just moments ago?
“All the same, you owe me one, sweetheart,” Belial was saying, apparently to him. “As far as repayment, I accept all forms of currency, although I prefer sexual favors.”
Maion didn’t really register that the sounds had meaning. He sank to his knees on the damp pavement, and the sword dropped from his unfeeling fingers and clattered on the stones; the flames evaporated, leaving just a cooling piece of steel. His head tipped forward, and he gazed down at the little pools of water in the cracks between the stones.
He’d never meant… He’d never thought… He’d just acted and reacted, playing along, and suddenly everything was gone.
He sensed Vincent’s hand moving for his shoulder and dragged himself up to his feet, staggering forward out of reach. He couldn’t. Not now. Compassion would shatter him.
“We’d better keep going,” he said.
He didn’t say There’s no going back.