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“Don’t we need Lucifer, first?” asked Azrael. “We have no idea where he is or where he’ll go next.”
“She wasn’t hard to find,” said Hekata, with a shrug. “Lucifer will be even easier to track down. He’s not exactly inconspicuous.”
I shook my head. “We won’t have to do any of that.”
“We won’t?”
“No… we don’t need to go to Lucifer, because Lucifer will come to us.”
“You don’t know that,” Azrael said, stiffening. “You can’t know that.”
“I do. Just as the portal was closing, after the demons made their way through… here… Lucifer told me it had been his plan all along to let them take refuge here. That way he can come to Helena, destroy this place, and kill anyone who dares stand against him once and for all.”
Azrael looked stunned for a moment, but her expression hardened. “Medrion tried to destroy this place and he failed. Lucifer tried once before, and he also failed. He will fail again.”
“Maybe…” I said, “But he has something Medrion doesn’t.”
“What’s that?” asked Micah.
“He doesn’t care about getting back into Heaven. He doesn’t have a cause, or a mission like Medrion did. He only has one goal, and that’s to kill all of us for the crime of rebelling against him and his ideas.”
Hekata scoffed. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“If he wants to fight until judgement day,” said Azrael, “then Helena stands ready. We know that he bleeds… and we’re going to make him regret ever coming here.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said. “Because once we’re all gone, there will be no one to stop him from taking this universe and doing whatever he wants with it. He will be worse than Medrion ever was.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
They put him in a cell and told me I couldn’t go see him. I knew Azrael thought she was making the right call by separating us both, but I didn’t even know if he was alive. I supposed they would’ve told me if he had died in his cell, or at least that was what I told myself to stave off the anxiety that came with not knowing.
I had, at least, had a chance to eat, drink, and have an honest to God shower. It was glorious. I drank a gallon of water, ate a plate covered in sausages, eggs, and vegetables, and felt like I had just washed ten years’ worth of dirt and grime off my skin.
Never in my entire existence had I ever felt as satisfied as I did, sitting in the small room I had been given. Yes, I was anxious about Abaddon, but I was fed, and watered, and clean for what felt like the first time ever.
Knowing that Lucifer was likely to show up at the bastion at any moment made it difficult to get any rest, not that I would’ve been able to sleep anyway. I found myself wandering the bastion a lot, touching the vines, the flowers, running my fingers through the various ponds scattered throughout the place.
Helena was still as beautiful and as full of life as I remembered. That, at least, hadn’t changed. But there was one thing that was different. I had felt it the moment I stepped through the portal, or rather, I’d felt its absence.
The Beacon of Helena was no longer lit. There was something profoundly sad about that, as if the last Light in all of the world had finally winked out, and we were all that was left. The last remnants of everything that was supposed to be good, and honorable.
Missolis and Hekata found me draped over a palisade, staring up at the unlit beacon. They leaned over the edge with me and looked up.
“What was that supposed to be?” asked Missolis.
It was a moment before I found the right word to reply with. “Hope,” I said. “It was meant to be hope. A beacon filled with angelic Light; a fountain of power and life in a barren desert.”
“Sounds awful,” said Hekata. “I’m glad it’s gone.”
“I watched an archangel murder an angel up there,” I said.
“It just became infinitely more interesting…”
I shook my head. “Feels like so long ago that I last saw her face. For the people here, it probably was.”
“Who was she?” asked Missolis.
“Her name was Helena, the angel this bastion is named after. She was a Lightbringer, like me. It was her Light that she’d used to create the beacon. Her intention was to create a well for all of us to drink from whenever we needed a sip of strength. Instead, a lunatic of an archangel saw it as a means to get back into Heaven.”
