Content warnings: blood and minor injury, vomiting, light body horror
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The sun-warmth of Heaven siphoned itself off his back as he stepped into the Neutral Zone. His every cell started excitedly counting down to when he would step back over the threshold, but he already knew he never would again.
His soul cried out in hollow grief like he was finding this out for the first time all over again. His body answered by begging to do that most angel of things and fall to his knees right there in the entryway, but the only thing worse than not getting his moment of anguish would be attracting the stares of all the angels coming in from Heaven. They might even try to comfort him, if—he fluttered his shoulderblades—yeah, his wings were still there, for now. He still looked like someone they should stop for. But his wings felt costume-fake as he folded them again and started walking.
Most of the Neutral Zone was a labyrinthine bazaar where anyone could trade just about anything. The neutral angels and neutral demons all used the same colors for their tents, so you could only tell who you were trading with when you got up close. That used to bother him, but why should it, at this point? He was basically a demon now anyway. Well, not like the one behind that counter, who looked suspiciously slick to the touch, and was getting it all over their wares…ugh. He turned around a corner, not much caring where he was going, and caught sight of Brian—fuck. Between accepting one “comforting” aphorism from Brian and becoming exactly like that vendor, he would rather become a gooey demon. He turned on his heel and the ground slid under him in a weird way, but he caught his balance and kept walking—all over the trail of white feathers he had been leaving behind him.
As he wove through the tents to distance himself from Brian, he considered his next move. Being in the Neutral Zone was clearly a mistake. He’d thought his Fall would be paused here, since it was exactly between Heaven and Hell, but apparently there was no stopping the changes once he left Heaven. And maybe no one was looking at him, but how could they not be, when he was unraveling with every step? The weight on his shoulders already felt lighter, and when he slid a surreptitious hand back, he found the bottom edges of his wings were at his waist. He sighed and turned himself mentally and physically in the direction of the entrance to Hell. All at once the twists and turns of the bazaar seemed to guide him straight there. Nothing actually moved, but he knew the way there like he knew the song of his heartstrings. He knew, with a horrible ripple through his being, that if he tried to do the same with Heaven it would no longer work. He didn’t bother turning back to try it.
By the time he arrived at the gates of Hell, the aftershocks of the ripple had made him feel like he was fracturing apart. His consciousness seemed like it was slowly flaking away, just like his wings. In the midst of feeling like he was being blown into strange distended shapes by a nonexistent wind, he presented his Token of Entry to the officer at the open gates of Hell. The officer flipped it like a coin and smiled when it landed on the side of damnation. Which, it had to—that’s what both sides meant, in the end. Empty-handed, and with his foreshortened wings tickling at his biceps, he stepped through the gates.
The blaze-warmth of Hell rushed up to meet him, and then seemed to coalesce in the bases of his wings, searing into his flesh like white-hot knives. He seemed to shape back into himself just in time to put out the fire that he was sure was all over his wings—but he had no wings, now, only a big empty space in the back of his shirt and scars that were somehow cool to the touch. So it was really over. Wings didn’t make an angel, but he hadn’t realized how much they made him an angel. They’d been nice wings, too, the kind he preened with utmost devotion, even down on World Z. Honestly, they’d even been nicer on World Z, where they took on a pigeon-grey patterning. He should have stayed there. Not that it was up to him. Nothing was ever up to him. But at least he could make the choice to stop standing on the bridge into Hell, which would probably make him feel a little better, even though the bridge really did look wide enough to let six Board members walk abreast and no one seemed to give a shit that he was milling around. He started walking.
In Heaven the architecture was always just a little bit squishy and malleable, but this seemed to be real black granite, or perhaps obsidian, because it was hard under his thin-soled sandals. Shouldn’t he have gotten a new uniform when he got here? Maybe they got a kick out of watching the Fallen scurry around like lost mortals. No one here was paying attention to him, though. They were too busy walking or hanging around the beautifully carved stone railings. Being stared at would be worse, but…well, he should have expected he would be just as alone here as he was in Heaven.
The bridge went on for quite a while, slowly curving lower and lower to the actual rim of the upper ring. The closer he got to land, the more he felt the all-consuming updraft of heat from the lava below, even as his body temperature seemed to drop. When he stepped onto the stone path that led away from the bridge, he was practically shivering.
“Halt,” someone said in a high voice, and his feet felt like molasses. He turned his head to see a short, fat, deep purple demon offering him a…tongue depressor? Apparently his only option was to accept it, but that wasn’t enough to unlock his feet.
“You have to slap it,” the demon said. They pulled another one out of seemingly nowhere and brought it down on the back of their wrist. It curled around their wrist like it had been commanded.
He copied them, not really expecting to get the same result, but the stick obeyed him and wrapped snugly around his wrist. A long number that started with 7- appeared on it.
“Oh, seventh circle,” the demon said, peering over his arm. “Nice.”
All at once his feet seemed to be free. Before he could move, they added, “The elevators are just right down there”—the direction the path was already going—“and then just follow the signs until you find the right number.”
“Thank you,” he said, and his voice sounded flat and wrong.
He cleared his throat as he walked away. Maybe the air was different here, and his voice traveled strangely through it. It was still different enough to be making him cold, colder than he ever remembered being before, colder with every step he took toward the elevators. The demons around him seemed fine. Maybe this was a sign he wasn’t supposed to be here? As he felt the tiniest spark of hope, the iciness fully overtook him, thrusting a thousand tiny needles through every vein, threading between every cell, turning every layer of his being into coldhot agony. What was this? He stumbled on his screaming legs and fell to his knees, scraping his hands hard on the stone as he used them to stop his momentum. Dizzy, he checked a stinging palm. Instead of the sparkling ambrosial ichor that he expected to see, a clear, mirrored substance welled up from his scrape, feeling like acid as it dripped across his skin. His skin itself was no longer lit golden from beneath, not with these branching tributaries of diamond running under it. Even as the frost started to clear from his mind, he felt like a glass salamander, see-through and in need of a rock to hide under. But what he actually was…it wasn’t an angel anymore, was it?
In Heaven they talked about the Fallen like debased angels, wannabes who just couldn’t quite make the cut. But were they angels? Angels didn’t bleed refractive blood, and they didn’t get scrapes where you could see the layers of skin fucked up separately, and their wings didn’t fall out over the course of ten minutes, and they didn’t feel the hardness of stone under their bones when they knelt, because angels were a little bit squishy and malleable, always molding a little to the environment. He was solid, now, and he wanted to throw up at the thought of it, and then at the realization that he was capable of throwing up. When he started to try and get up, his knees felt like two whetstones rubbing together, and he wanted to die. He was going to have flesh-bones for the rest of eternity. Had all the murder been worth it for this? He wanted to cry, but not even tears would grace his sorry sack of a physical form.
After a long, long time pitying himself there on the walkway of Hell, he raised his head and steeled himself to start walking again.
Maybe he’d been too quick to judge his knees. Walking seemed as normal as ever, except for the way the ground juddered up his skeleton with every step. He tried treading softly, like he was walking the altar circuit. It required so much concentration he almost didn’t notice when he reached the elevators. Angels talked about the elevators like they were the second gates of Hell, but they really didn’t look like much. They barely even had doors leading into the narrow shafts. He walked down the row of bronze tubes and found the one for the seventh circle—if they were really such dramatic elevators, shouldn’t they access all the circles?—and when he pressed the button, it opened on a round car that seemed to be the size of one person. He stepped inside. Before he could get his bearings, the door pressed shut behind him and he was being launched down the shaft so fast he was surprised he hadn’t hit his head on the ceiling. When the door opened again, he stumbled out sideways and lost the nothing contents of his transmogrified flesh-stomach in the nearest trash can. At least, he hoped it was a trash can. It sure smelled like one. If it wasn’t, he didn’t want to be there when someone noticed that he’d barfed in it, so he haltingly started walking again.
The first sign was hardly ten feet away. His number was to the left. As he followed that path, he slowly became aware that past the low wall that curved alongside it was a vast open plain, or maybe a marsh, because it seemed to be flooded with mortals’ blood. It probably wasn’t real blood, because where would they get that much blood…? Actually, he didn’t want to think about it. He hurried along to the next sign, which sent him off to the left again.
It wasn’t long before he started to see the dwellings the sign numbers referred to: round spaces bored into the sides of the mountains that surrounded the bloodplain. Literal hellholes. The path took him past level after level of them, stacked high toward the ceiling. Considering his new total lack of flight, his hellhole was probably right at the top of one of these peaks. Maybe all Fallen lived up there. Soon, maybe he’d be shouting through the voice-deadening air to some other sod on a neighboring peak. Wait. He stopped and glanced around to make sure that the path was really empty, then tried speaking again.
“Jerry,” he said. His name, chalky and lifeless to his ears, even though he’d said it just the same as always.
“Brian.” His tongue didn’t burst into flames, so that was also a lie angels told. But the sound of it in the air wasn’t any different.
“In the name of the Father,” he started, and his tongue still didn’t burn, but he suddenly understood what was wrong. Normally when he uttered a Reference, it poured out of his mouth like liquid music, a choir of chords all condensed into his angel-size voice. All other words were like that too, just not to the same degree. But now when he said them, the only tones that went into them were the ones his flesh-throat could produce. That was why they sounded like empty slate.
He supposed that he’d forfeited keeping any part of himself sacred, but this was a lower blow than having hard bones. What was an angel with no voice? Even angels who could not speak, who struggled to communicate anything in any manner, still rippled the ether when they did. To communicate, to commune, was one of their highest callings. And now he was alone, barely vibrating the molecules of the air. The ether hadn’t gone anywhere—he could still feel it everywhere—but none of him was permitted connect to it.
So he couldn’t be an angel anymore. Or a Fallen, for that matter, because that was just short for “fallen angel”, and he wasn’t an angel. He was almost human, with this flesh body, but humans didn’t bleed crystal either. And they didn’t remember what it felt like to be shapeless in Heaven. Demons could look like anything, though, and their bodies were at least more flesh than angels’. But demons could also touch the ether. That was how he’d been stopped in his tracks with a single word. No, he was fully a That Which Had Been An Angel. An Unangel. An angel.
“Angel,” he said aloud. It sounded like the word was being stuffed back into his mouth as it came out. “Aaaangeeelllll.” Something about it gave the sense of agitating the ether, but he was pretty sure it was just a trick of his ears. Did they not use this word in Heaven to avoid the question of what an angel was? Did the angels even know about angels? Surely they weren’t all as naïve as he had been.
“Angel,” he said with finality before he started to walk again.
He walked, and he walked, and still he walked, and his legs were starting to get tired, which wasn’t supposed to happen. His feet were starting to hurt, too. But he had only a thousand more hellholes to go.
It was two thousand, or three. His legs were leaden and on fire. His feet became an abstract stabbing ache with every step. His hips begged him to stop, and his abs just wanted to let go, and finally, finally, he arrived at his door.
It wasn’t locked. When it swung open on squeaking hinges, he thought for a second that someone else must live there, because the place was a mess. He checked the nameplate on the door, and it very definitely showed his name. No one was here currently, so maybe they’d been moved, or maybe it was just standard practice to trash someone’s hellhole before they moved in. Whatever. There was still a bed, and he was still collapsing onto it. He would figure out all that other stuff after he’d napped for an indefinite period of time. He shut his eyes against the blanket.
Thirty seconds later he sat up, gasping. It hadn’t occurred to him in all that walking that he had to breathe now. He flopped onto his back and stared up at the popcorn ceiling—well, that was familiar, at least—and thought about breathing until he fell asleep.