Apocalypse: The Battlefield of Life

"On the field of Truth,
On the battlefield of Life,
What came to pass, Sanjaya,
When my sons and their warriors
Faced those of my brother Pandu?"
- Bhagavad-Gita

The Headquarters of the Just-Us League of Administration stretched for miles above the earth. On its better days, it was a palace of beauty and righteousness, gleaming crenellated silver and black glass. On a normal day, it was guarded by forces, both offensive and defensive, that could lay waste to most universes. Barring massive catastrophe, it was perpetually inhabited by the members of the League, as powerful a collection of individuals as had ever been brought together in one place.

This was not one of the better days. This was not a normal day. This was not even a day. This was a night of the Apocalypse, which was a catastrophe all its own. The skyscraper, the concrete plaza spreading before it, even the pure, stainless adimantium globe at the courtyard's center, were blackened, twisted, bent, slagged by fire and washed with blood. Bodies of defenders lay twisted on top of the ones who had slain them, swords transfixing chitinous worms, angels lying pock-marked with hypersonic flechettes, men, women, creatures mystical and robotic, dismembered, dead, or dying on the blackened concrete. Some of them twitched. Some screamed. Most were silent.

Smoke choked the air.

Inside broken front doors, the halls were clean, their lights glowing softly. The Headquarters had been designed to stand longer than those who had made it, and those who might destroy it. It had been designed well. No signs of violence marred the walls, the hallways. Terminals, viewscreens were still in working order, and the great black and silver banner in the lobby still hung, swaying gently in a soft wind.

At the center of the Headquarters, on the ground floor, was a room rounded by walls of adimantium, crafted spells, and intricate twistings of space and time. It was not a decorated room, being bare of walls and floor, lit only by an overhead fluorescent light. Small grooves marked the wall, should one examine closely, just above the floor, which, had someone stood on it, would not have dipped at all.

Far below the room, through a shaft of empty space that was only empty if one approached it from a certain direction, was a maze. There was no solution to the maze, but rather an appropriate sequence of failures, and a certain level of sacrifice. Past the maze, there was a door. Behind the door was a room.

Without entering the first chamber, without descending to and passing through the maze, without opening the door, there was no way to enter the room. It did - does - not even precisely exist, as you and I exist. Yet, if one were to look at things from its point of view, one would perhaps think that it existed more profoundly than we would ever imagine... But still, it was unapproachable save in the way described.

At least, this is what they would want you to think. There are always back doors. Some architects just can't resist putting them in. But more of that for later.

Now, watch. Something moved beneath the earth, and made a number of the right wrong turns. It passed through fire, and was not burned, and stayed for a great deal of time beneath water, and did not drown. Something came before it, a thing which it loved, and it wept as it was forced to slay. It stood before the door, and waited.

It has waited a while, but something comes that was worth it.

Everything.

*

Because things need to be done in a certain order, the Horsemen arrived first on the border of League Plaza. Their motors echoed with the screams of dying, and, to ears that did not entirely exist on the mortal world, resounded with the wails of the dead. Pestilence rode in front, as always, and the three others followed. They taxied slowly over concrete and flesh with equal ease, came to rest before the front steps of the Headquarters, dismounted, and waited, their backs to the broken front doors. Smoke and steam curled around them, and their footfalls painted stairs with blood.

Six sets of sixfold wings beat against the air, and the remaining Seraphim stood to the right of the Horsemen. They stood on space as if it were a cathedral's tile floor, although in truth being in places of religion made all of them a little uneasy in a vague, uncertain way. Gabriel's perpetual smile twisted upwards, but his cold blue eyes leveled on Pestilence as he spoke. "We are prepared to do this thing."

The Maskim had spent millions of years perfecting the physical form, and even in the last moments, they were not wont to give up their art. They walked out of shadows, out of alleys, wearing the best, most imperfect bodies they had learned to construct in long aeons of practice. There were two exceptions, as always: Astarte, whose nature made it such that imperfection was not an appropriate option, and Leviathan, who flitted from shadow to shadow and was always something, but never quite enough of anything. Walking unflinchingly through pools of blood, leaving red footprints, they approached. Beelzebub took the lead, his strides long and even, dead hands and skulls crunching beneath his leather shoes. Strangely, no matter how much bodily pulp or blood splashed up from the bodies below, nothing discolored his night-black, pin-striped slacks.

The Maskim took their places on the left. Beelzebub coughed, smiled, and tugged sharply on the lapel of his suit coat. "We are ready asszzzz well."

Pestilence nodded. Behind him, the Three stood silent. "Then let us go."

The Horsemen turned, and together, the lords of Heaven, Hell, and the World walked up the front steps of the League Headquarters.

*

Far away from League Plaza, on an out-of-the way street wet with blood and littered with bodies, none of them living, a woman walked in the shadows. Her hair was dark, and wet. She wore black lace underwear, panties and bra, and a much-abused black leather shoulder holster, in which currently resided a similarly used Desert Eagle. Her feet were bare, and every once in a while she pulled away from a patch of broken glass, or a jagged shard of steel. Walls rose on all sides of her, dark and stone, and here and there a building had been reduced to rubble. She tried not to look at the bodies, but that was of little use. Shadows wove around her shoulder blades, and gave the illusion of small black raven's wings sprouting from her back, although her skin would have been smooth to the touch of man or woman.

Angie Blackfeather had been running for quite some time now, and she was afraid. Her ammunition was low, and most firearms stores had been looted for all they were worth during the early hours of the riots. Weapons depots had been the site of armed resistance to incursions both angelic and demonic, and now lay in ashes. Here and there, men and women hung crucified in the air, entrails in, or dangling from them like a wet dog's shaggy hair. Some still twisted in pain.

It was dark, a touch after midnight, and clouds obscured stars and sky. Flights of angels flitted, danced among the gathering storm, and bursts of flame interposed where they battled. Here and there, some would descend to bring death to those below, but most of the resistance had ceased, for exhaustion if for nothing else. Angels, and Demons, did not seem to need sleep. Humans did. A burst of lighting, real lightning, swept over the city, followed less than a second later by a crackling roll of thunder loud and sudden enough to make her jump.

Another thunderbolt fell, and another, as if the pagan gods were trying one last time to save their kingdom. Perhaps this was, in fact, the case. The rain slicked Angie's pale, exposed flesh, stung her eyes, streamed into her mouth. She watched, and if another drop of water, more salty and personal in origin, ran down the curve of her cheek to hang trembling on the ridge of her lip before she licked it away, there was nobody to see it.

Whisper was dead. She was alive, nearly naked, in the middle of a city of the dead. The only living people she had seen so far had scurried away like rats, and she had been unable to bring them out again. Somewhere, fighting had to be going on. Somewhere... But, she knew, that was wrong. Nothing had to be. Now, least of all.

Four bullets left in the gun. She was tired.

A distant roaring filled her ears, and two baleful lights appeared at the far end of the street. The rain fell heavily against her eyes, blurred her vision, but there was... something... Something great, black, and metal approached, and fast. Maybe it was someone who had survived, something worth talking to... Maybe they had ammo. Maybe they had a bed. Maybe they had clothes... The lights were much closer now, and the metallic shape was a black minivan.

She stepped out towards the middle of the road, but slipped in a pool of something she did not want to identify, and fell. Limbs scraped against the pavement as she struggled to rise, but she was tired, and the van was coming on so fast, heedless of overturned buildings, lampposts, bodies in its way. Five feet from her, closer still in a blur of light and night. She screamed-

It stopped, ebony radiator grill inches away from her face. The headlights glared into her eyes, and she shrank from them. Somewhere far away, a door opened and closed. Chest heaving, she was dimly aware of footsteps on pavement. Two great arms cradled her like a child, and lifted her seemingly without effort. Weakly, she looked up into a face which, despite its possessing two eyes of gray color, a normal model mouth and nose, two eyebrows, cheekbones, and lines of age as a man would, she would never in a million years have described as human. Something old and terrible lived in those eyes.

His mouth moved, and he said in a voice thick with thousands of accents at once - "I reckon you might be able to tell me where the Jay Elle Ay Headquarters are? Some business I have as needs takin' care of."

Angie's eyes rolled back into her head, and she passed out.

*

It is customary to describe time and space bending, or at least the fabric of the world shifting, when great deals of matter move from one place to another, viz teleportation. This is not done here, because this did not happen. This is what did, in fact, occur:

One moment, the unimportant rear hallway of the Just-Us League of Administration building was empty. The next, several individuals (people being a rather exclusive term) were in it. Azaquiel straightened, smiled, and with a flourish, spun and tipped his brilliant, white hat onto his close-cropped head of curly dark hair.

Stella laughed. "You stole that one. From Sinatra."

"He's not using it any more, is he?"

Phil ran one hand over the smooth, slightly cold surface of the wall, like a man looking at the face of a loved one following long separation: desirous, almost beatific, but deeply troubled. The JLA logo, silver and black, rested beneath his fingertips.

Seryph blinked. "No bodies."

"What?" Lester turned. Sweat ran down his forehead, but his eyes were relieved. He straightened from a fighting crouch, tugging dismissively on his ragged cuffs.

Bryn nodded and stepped closer to Seryph, his eyes searching the walls, nostrils flaring as he tasted the air. "He's right. There aren't any bodies here. Not even scratches. No sign of a struggle. And, even though I don't know these people very well, I'd hazard they would put up a fight."

A dark shadow crept onto Seryph's face, hand falling naturally towards his sword hilt. "This place even smells clean. I don't like it."

Even though Phil faced the wall, his voice carried, echoing tinnily in their ears. "They put up a fight." He stood, back turned, and none of them could see his distantly paternal smile. "They did put up a fight. All of them. The skies ran red with molten air, and the land was pitted with acid where they fell. Angels gathered so thick that were you to brush your hand through the outer air, it would pass through them. Demons rose out of the earth like seas of mutilated ants, and attacked. And they were thrown back, two times, five times, ten. The discharge of heat and smoke from the battle is still playing hell with our atmosphere. That's where the storm outside came from." He turned to them, and Stella took a step back, breath indrawn. She ran into Sam, wrapped in entropy as well as his cloak, and felt the reassuring chill of his skeletal hand on her shoulder. Phil's eyes were all black, run through with lines of light green and points of silver, like circuit boards, with no whites to be seen.

"But even the Headquarters can't hold on forever. The walls were breached, the doors thrown open. What was essential had been accomplished: evacuation, followed with an order for the building to defend itself. Any creature who entered it was supposed to be disintegrated before it could take more than two steps inside."

Bryn's eyes were now much more eager in their staring at the walls. "So why are we still alive?"

Lester's smile was tired, as if he didn't have the energy left to be funny. "Whose corporation do you think subcontracted the AI to run the weapons system?"

Azaquiel smiled a shark's smile. "Yours. And, of course, the building's AI knows well enough that it is not to do anything to you while you are inside. I straightened that out with it before we came in."

Stell coughed. "And you can't tell it to kill the Seraphim and the Maskim because..."

"Because it is a matter of will. And because the universe is constructed, at this point, to enable the Maskim and Seraphim to reach the Nexus room. I cannot overcome that."

HOW NICE. Sam's voice, like the rest of him, was cold. NOW. I BELIEVE THERE IS WORK TO DO?

His mouth a thin, reddish line, Phil nodded, and removed his hand from the wall. It glowed for a moment where his fingers had touched, and faded. He blinked, fingers straying around his temple for a moment, and when he opened his eyes again, they were the normal color of blue. "Yes. Let's go."

*

Seryph walked towards the head of the line, behind Phil, hands limp at his sides, but ever ready to seek the hilt of his sword. His eyes darted from the walls, to the floor, to the softly glowing ceiling. Wherever they landed, they lingered for a moment on the silver-black JLA insignia before moving on. Distantly, he heard Phil speaking. "What?"

"I said, do you miss it?" Neither of them looked at the other. They had known one another, worked together, saved each other's necks so often that looks were no longer necessary. "Here, I mean. The place."

Seryph laughed under his breath. As they walked, he reached out his hand and touched the wall, running the rough, sword-callused palm of his hand over the smooth synthetic marble. Something twisted inside his stomach as he answered. "I'm not sure. Sometimes. But I needed it." A shadow clung, briefly, to the hard angles of his face, and passed away. "I needed it."

Phil nodded. The light lingered in his dark hair, glowed off the white of his dress uniform, surrounding him with a fluorescent halo. "I can see why."

"Excuse me?"

"This Avatar thing. It's wearing. I know you probably get used to it after a while, but..." He glanced over his shoulder, and Seryph caught a momentary glint of metal and glass in his eye. "The... awareness. Feels like I've got another body, and it's being torn all to hell. But..." He trailed off, and the silence echoed off the walls. They turned left, and the others followed in a shuffling of feet, punctuated only by the sharp tap-tap-tapping of Scythe-haft against floor.

Seryph's eyes tracked back to the white-clad figure, lingering on the black-trimmed silver insignia on the shoulder of Phil's dress uniform. His felt as though someone had placed a heavy weight on his words, and a fire behind his eyes. "But at the same time, it's the most wonderful damn thing that's ever happened to you. You're known. You're accepted. Loved, by something greater than yourself, something that you're only the smallest part of. You feel more complete than you've ever been before, and the thought of living without this... without her inside you is the thought of living without a soul."

This time, Phil did not turn around, but his head did dip, once, as he nodded. "Always said you should be a poet, old son."

Seryph smiled. "English major, through the heart." A pause, and he heard once more the sounds of feet. "And yourself?"

"Film."

"Ah." Seryph nodded. He joined his hands together behind his back and walked on. "You think that, in all likelihood, this universe is going to survive the next half hour?"

"No."

"Good. I thought it was just me."

They walked on.

*

Consciousness came slowly to Angie. She was aware of a distant, rhythmic thumping, and of motion. Light came next, and what little color there was to see. Her skin adhered to the black leather of an upholstered car seat. She struggled to sit up, but her limbs gave out beneath her.

"Be careful. You've been through a lot."

The voice was different than the one which she had heard before passing out, but at the same time achingly familiar. "Who..."

"For the moment, you can call me Three. Doubtless you're trying to remember where you met me. Don't bother. It doesn't work that way. I'm sitting in the passenger seat, if it helps any. A hitch-hiker, like yourself, if in slightly greater possession of my own faculties. Our host is driving."

The second voice, sliding over the distant purring of the vehicle's engine and the drumming of rain against the roof, was much more familiar. Gray-gold eyes never birthed from a mother's womb glanced back at her through the obsidian rear-view mirror. "I reckon you should listen to what the man says."

"Indeed." This time, she caught the source of the voice: a figure, hooded and cloaked, sitting in the passenger's seat.

Angie struggled to sit up. "Thanks for stopping. You're a saint."

"Suppose you could say that."

The pain of overtaxed muscles washed over her, and she let herself slide back to the seat. A low groan escaped her lips, and she lay, still and supine, staring into the rain beyond the windshield. "Did you say... You wanted to find..."

"The J.L.A. Headquarters." She couldn't hear they periods, but something about his voice left her in no doubt that they were there. "Yeah. The other fellah already gave me directions."

"What're you trying to get there for?"

"Got a delivery to make."

She opened her mouth to talk again, but no words came. Still, chest heaving, she struggled to speak...

"Angie. I'm sorry, but you need to rest now." The figure that called itself Three turned around, confronting Angie with a mass of shadow and blue highlights, dominated by a gleamingly broad, toothy grin. "Sleep."

She fainted.

*

The assembled Councils stepped into a gleaming, spit-polished hall, the air tainted slightly with scents of smoke and lavender. Gabriel scanned the room, acknowledging his reflection in the black and silver tile floor. The reception desk was unmanned, the chandelier above lit, the mosaic ceiling of precious gems and metals from all the worlds gleaming in its light. No tapestries or wall hangings obscured the shimmering crenellations and the ever-changing marblesque waves of the wall, save the floor-length JLA logo, black and silver, at the far end of the chamber. Knife-blue eyes narrowed, but the hanging still shimmered.

Pestilence laughed, and gestured, like a man making a great half-circle in sand. Space receded from him, wave upon wave, and struck the tapestry. Crisp ebony and sterling faded, tarnished, dulled, and fell in a wave of dust that disappeared before touching the ground. Behind it, there was only a blank wall.

They walked forward, feet percussive against the floor, shadows and reflections spiraling like razorblades away from their advance. They did not move to avoid the receptionist's desk, but walked through it, and it melted where they walked. Reaching the wall, Pestilence extended one white-gloved hand, flakes of skin fraying beneath the cuff of his jacket, and in a moment of Escher-like confusion, opened a door that had not been there before, and walked through.

*

Azaquiel straightened. "They're moving. Faster." He didn't run, but his step quickened markedly, bringing him briefly to the front of the line.

In the sudden rush to keep up, Bryn closed enough with Seryph to ask, "Why can't he just take us there? Do the jump thing?"

Before Seryph could respond, Azaquiel turned on his heel and continued to walk backward, every bit as sure and swift as he had been when walking forward. "Because, my friend, there are certain right ways to do things. We can't go straight there for the same reason that the Councils can't just hover up in orbit and blast this whole place to oblivion. It wouldn't work properly. There is only one right way to get to the Nexus, in order to do true work with it. We're going the way, and it looks like the others are going to beat us." Shrugging, he turned again, just in time to take, by Phil's prompting, a left turn.

Near the back of the line, strolling easily, Sam regarded the company. He was not troubled, exactly, his wounds having been healed, but he was relying on the Scythe for support more than he would have liked. Stella walked next to him, ahead a little, hair long and brilliant as ever, not precisely red, but run through with strands of yellow, gold, deep copper, orange, and all the colors of a flame. If he had been another individual, he would have thought that her being perhaps an inch taller, as if her feet were not entirely touching the ground, was a product of his imagination. It was not. Nor was the tracery of green fire that he saw at times within her eyes. They had not been there the night before. Perhaps it was revealing herself as she had done which made the difference. Perhaps it was fear. Perhaps the factor was something else entirely. Making the turn, he closed with her a bit more than was necessary.

STELLA. ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?

She turned to look at him, and for a moment her hair did not just resemble fire, it was fire, real fire, but only for a moment. Her brow was creased, as if deep in thought. "Hmmm?" He did not repeat himself. "Yes. Yes, of course, I..." Her tired smile gave her away. "No. Christ." They walked for a moment in silence. "You know, I've never told that... that much of the story to anyone, before."

IT WASN'T YOUR FAULT.

Green eyes flashed a deeper, pure jade, before she regained control. "Do you think I don't know that?" In the lead, Phil and Seryph had a brief argument over which direction the turn was, and settled on straight ahead. The overhead air conditioners kicked in, and a small swarm of microscopic maintenance bots swarmed by them, like thousands of precise, mechanical gnats. "The problem wasn't the casting down. It was that... That..." The pronoun she used then was not an English pronoun, nor was it a pronoun of any other language pronounceable by mortal tongues, including as it did the concepts of all genders and tenses at once, and none. However, as it is similarly impossible to represent in the written language, the simple masculine will have to satisfy for convenience: "That He wasn't there. Maybe he wasn't in the first place. Hell, the things in the darkness were there without Him. Wouldn't He notice? Or do something? What we did... There hasn't been anything I've heard of, any mass murderer ever arisen, that quite matched what happened there, at the beginning. Wouldn't He do something to stop it? Was he ever there, Sam? Did anyone ever live on the House? Or was it all just some huge fucking accident?" By the end, her voice had sunk to a whisper. Her nostrils flared, and it was easy to see water glittering in her eyes.

Sam did not speak for quite some time. Awkwardly, he wrapped his free arm around her shoulders, and drew her to him, and she stepped closer, even though she trembled at his touch, and the shadows wreathing his body dampened the flame of her hair.

I DON'T KNOW.

She stiffened, and for a moment he had to pull her bodily forward to keep them from falling behind. "What?"

I SAID, I DON'T KNOW. They turned left. I'M NOT GOING TO GIVE YOU ANY OF THAT "THE LORD WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS" BULLSHIT, IF YOU'LL EXCUSE MY FRENCH. I'M DON'T KNOW WHETHER OR NOT HE EXISTS, OR, IN THE END, IF IT EVEN MATTERS. WE'RE HERE NOW. THERE ARE RULES. WE WORK WITHIN THEM, AND DO THE BEST THAT WE CAN. OR, SOMETIMES, WE HAVE TO BREAK THE RULES, AND TAKE THE CONSEQUENCES. THE CONCEPT OF A DIVINE EQUIVOCATOR SEEMS KIND OF SILLY, DOESN'T IT? MAYBE, IF HE EXISTS, THE REASON NOBODY WAS SUPPOSED TO GO INTO THE HOUSE WAS BECAUSE WE'RE SUPPOSED TO TAKE CARE OF OURSELVES. YOU SAID ONCE THAT YOU MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE WHEN YOU TRIED TO ORDER THE WORLD. WHAT IF THE PROBLEM WAS NEVER ONE OF NO FREE WILL, BUT ONE OF TOO MUCH? WHAT IF HE REALLY COULD DO WHATEVER HE WANTED, BUT HE WANTED TO DO NOTHING?

In spite of herself, she laughed. "You're saying God is lazy?"

NOT NECESSARIALLY. JUST THAT WE WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO BECOME SO.

They stopped suddenly. There was a door at the end of the hallway, great, metal, and marked with caution slogans in a subliminal display which flashed warnings of destruction in millions of languages at once. The gist was something of this kind: "Hello. Don't come in here. If you're looking to commit suicide, there are much cheaper ways to do it which do not involve bothering our janitorial staff. Thanks - The JLA." A status LED gleamed on the wall beside the door: a single red arrow, going down.

Azaquiel turned slowly, his eyes still glowing with the red of the LED. "We're too late. They've gone down."

*

The Seraphim had never been in an elevator before. If they wanted to go somewhere on the mortal planes, it was normally much less effort to simply transfer one's mass to a place, or even to infect a given mortal with religious dementia, and as such not have to leave at all in order to make an entrance. This circular platform, descending down a long metal shaft, was entirely foreign to them, and they were by turns enjoying the experience immensely and being quite annoyed that they had to be limited, for once, by the constraints of matter.

The Maskim had much more cause to travel amongst mortals as mortals, and so were substantially less amazed, and proportionally more annoyed. At least, to Beelzebub's mind, the JLA had not installed elevator muzak. There was an art to inflicting pain, and he felt about the creators of muzak in much the same way Mozart would think of your sub-average boy band. Crossing his arms over his chest, he hummed a few bars from Handel's {Messiah}. Perhaps Mozart's Requiem would be more appropriate, but so undoubtedly typified. Gabriel glared at him, and he smiled, baring canines just perceptibly sharpened for the purpose.

Pestilence stood in front of them all, the Diadem blazing on his brow, and, Beelzebub suspected, a smile on his own lips. Clearing his throat, the Lord of the Flies darted a glance at Astarte, who shifted nervously and smiled, almost like a girl. She had changed her blue blouse, spattered with assassin's blood, for a red one, the top button loose to reveal a tantalizing square inch of flesh below the hollow of her collarbone. Her eyes met his for a moment, and slid away. If he didn't know her better - no, he decided, that was wrong. He did know her better, and she was nervous. He was, too, perhaps, and a little concerned. Soon, he would put the final seal on the tomb of his art.

He regarded War, not knowing if the woman could sense it or not, her sinuous body gloved in skin-tight leather, the wicked blade belted across her back. She shifted, and light twisted around her like Egyptian asps about the body of an exotic dancer, beautiful and frightening in the same moment.

The elevator lurched to a stop, two adimantium doors ground open, and they walked out into the darkness of the maze.

*

Waiting outside the elevator shaft, Stella was distantly aware of the crackling of thunder, and heard (or was it a trick of her mind?) the prickling of rain on glass. Azaquiel stood silent. She touched Seryph's arm, and he turned to her with a smile, but they said nothing. The status LED turned into a red circle for a moment, then became a green arrow pointing up. Coughing, Azaquiel turned back to them, and Stella realized with shock that he had not lit a cigarette since they came inside the Headquarters.

"When the elevator comes back up, you will go down with it. I won't go with you." He did not smile. "I know the way of old, but the way knows me, too. I stay here."

"How convenient." Phil's eyes narrowed. "We go down there and do the dying, while you stay up here and it's 'Come back safe, boys'. I don't buy it." His eyes glared tesla-coil lightning. "I think you're afraid."

Azaquiel's eyebrows elevated. "Really? What a shame you feel that way. The fact remains: the maze knows me. It won't let me pass. If I go with you, none of us will survive."

Phil looked for a moment as if he were about to retort, but Seryph laid a hand upon his friend's arm, and shook his own head. "Not now, Phil. If Mister Azaquiel-"

"Just Azaquiel, if you don't mind."

"If Azaquiel doesn't want to come, we're not going to force him. He's done quite enough for us already. Right?"

Phil coughed. "Right." Behind Azaquiel, the elevator door chimed, and the LED changed to a green circle again. "Now, if you'll excuse me..." He brushed roughly past the other white-clad man. Their eyes met for a moment, and Phil looked away first. Pressing forward, the Lead Admin Guy touched his hand to the door. It opened.

Goosebumps rose all down Stella's arms as she stepped through the threshold, onto the elevator platform. They had been here, only a few moments before. Their breath still perfumed the air, their imprints still lay on the space. She shivered, and looked up at Sam, who at the same time looked down at her. None of the others seemed to notice, their eyes darting around the smooth metallic dome, the single light fixture, looking for controls of some kind, all save Phil and Seryph, who stood still. Evidently, they knew what was coming.

Azaquiel remained outside the elevator. A smile broke on his face then, and he tipped his hat to them. "Good luck, friends. If you don't succeed, I doubt if I'll have time to know, so... au revoir." He bowed eloquently, and as the door slid closed, Stella thought he was reaching for his cigarettes.

As the door came to a rest, more lights activated on the walls, from every direction, casting first four shadows, then eight, then none at all, so that the air itself glowed. Nobody spoke for a moment. Phil stood in the exact center of the elevator, eyes closed, arms limp at his side, head cocked back so that, had his eyes been open, he would have been staring straight into the overhead fixture. Stell breathed. Apart from the private sounds of beating hearts and rushing blood and exchanging breath, the room was silent.

Phil lowered his head, breathed out, opened his eyes, and the platform began to descend. A grin traced itself on his thin mouth. "Will." When Stella looked at him curiously, his grin widened. "We've had so many people try and break into the Nexus chambers for one reason or another that we decided it would be best to make the way a little more complicated. No elevator controls, just a thought scanner. The predominant wish in your mind has to be to go down, not to do anything once you get there. Kind of silly, really, but it works against most people." He nodded, satisfied, but nobody spoke. Lester crouched near the fast moving wall, staring at the floor, his skin pale as paste, eyes wide. Bryn paced like a caged tiger, eyes traveling around the walls. Seryph stood still. She turned back to Sam, only to see him watching, shadows drawing across the gleaming bone dome of his face, the sparks of his eyes staring out of vacant sockets.

Several minutes later, the elevator touched down. She looked up, and saw only the shaft, stretching out to the vanishing point above. They must have traveled down farther than she thought.

Seryph turned to Phil, and coughed. "Do you want to lead?"

"No," Phil shook his head. "I've been down this road more often than you, and we need to go fast."

Seryph nodded. When the doors opened, he was the first to step out into the darkness. The rest followed, in single file, Sam last. Stella, finding herself behind Phil, took the opportunity to whisper to him as they stepped into the night, "Why couldn't you lead us?"

No light penetrated this deep in the earth. Rock pressed in about them, wet and dripping, and her feet slid over packed earth. Crystals glimmered here and there amid the dark stone, but for the most part, the whole world was a uniform black. Seryph turned, the doors closed behind them, and night swallowed them whole. She took a quick breath, preparing to summon light, but Phil's voice hissed back at her. "Don't. We need the darkness."

She blinked, and saw no difference between the inside of her head and the world around her. "What?"

The only reason she knew Phil was looking over his shoulder was that her ears, sharpened by the dark, perceived the rustle of fabric moving over fabric. He spoke in a whisper. "Because you can't get to the True Nexus by going the right way. At every turn, you need to take the opposite of what your instincts tell you. If you travel the maze too many times, you start to remember where the Nexus is physically, and then you're sunk." They turned again. "But, in order to start being able to travel on your own, someone needs to show you the way the first time. You can get lost in here as easily by not knowing where you're going as by knowing exactly where you are."

Stella reached out with her left hand to touch the wall, and found that it was no longer there. "You'd think they could just install a door lock, or something." They turned again, left, and left, and left, and Stella was certain that they were passing through the place where they had been a moment before, as there was no noticeable incline, but she said nothing.

"One important difference between this and a door lock." Ahead, someone stumbled, and regained their footing. "This works."

*

Beelzebub disliked this state of affairs. He was not used to walking blind in the night, but there was something about this darkness that laid upon the eyes of the soul as well as the body. Pestilence walked ahead of them all, the light of his diadem faint, but visible. It did not illuminate the darkness, simply provided a point of reference for him, and for the rest, to follow. Even the Seraphim did not shed light here.

They were all hopelessly lost.

Then, as if someone had turned on a light switch, he crossed an invisible line in the black and stood in a wide semicircular chamber, upon a fractal mosaic of black, silver, and sapphire. The room was domed with obsidian, set with the occasional gleaming sparks of diamond and quarts veins, so that it resembled the void of space. The others stood around the perimeter of the dome, evenly spaced, with Pestilence at the center, opposite the one door of the room. Nowhere could Beelzebub see the arches through which they had entered.

A figure stood in front of the door. It was large, burly, leather clad, and by all appearances human, save for a few minor errors on behalf of whatever artist had crafted it. First, its eyes glowed red, even through its mirrored sunglasses. Second, the long, glistening weapon he held, both barrels leveled at the assembled Councils, was far too massive for any human to wield one-handed.

Pestilence coughed, and spat out a piece of his lung on the mosaic. "You're in our way, friend. Move."

The creature raised its eyes, and Beelzebub noticed something else strange. The sunglasses were not perched on its head as they would be on a human. They were part of its head. It opened its mouth, and said in a voice that owed more, much more, to speakers and metal than flesh and vocal chords: "DELETE."

It aimed, and fired, and Ao, standing next to Gabriel across the semicircle from Beelzebub, ceased to be. Only a greasy black spot marred the mosaic where he had stood.

Before the DELETER could fire again, they were upon it.

*

Stella straightened at the sound of distant thunder. Her ears, focused by the darkness of the cavern, strained, and she heard that it was not thunder, but the sound of a battle. She heard - or imagined that she heard - roars of rage and screams of pain, but who their originators were, she could not say. Some of the voices sounded familiar, though...

"Shit." Phil swore.

She swallowed, wet her lips, and whispered back to him. "Is there a problem?"

"Battle."

"Isn't that a good thing?"

"No." Phil swallowed hard in the night, beneath the earth, and Stell became aware in a cold rush of indrawn breath just how much earth there was to be beneath. "Our only violent defense at this point is right at the gate to the Nexus. If he can hear it, he knows where it is. If he knows where it is..." He trailed off, and the distant roar of combat was the only thing to break the silence.

A voice filled her ears then, soft, clear, and pure, though obviously untrained. It was Seryph's voice. He was singing, only slightly off-key.

"The minstrel boy to the war has gone,
In the ranks of death you will find him.
His father's sword he hath girded on,
And his wild harp hung behind him."

She knew the song. It echoed and spun strangely beneath the world, like a light all its own, entrapping the mind, twisting the soul. In this system of caves and tunnels below Khazan, she fancied for a moment, it could carry for miles, perhaps even reach the surface again one day. A soft smile on her face, she joined in, and Seryph's note rose to join her perfect pitch.

"'Oh, land of song,' said the warrior bard,
Though all this world betrays thee,
One sword shall e'er avenge thy wrongs,
One harp forever praise thee..."

They sang beneath the earth, and Seryph wandered ahead, leading, lost beyond all recognition.

*

Light...

Blurring sounds...

Blasts of light, unlight...

Glaring red eyes...

The retort of a double-barreled shotgun that was not a shotgun...

Unfeeling eyes of cold crystal glare down from a fractured vault of obsidian.

*

The darkness cracked around her, and Stell jumped involuntarily, her eyes struggling to take her surroundings. It took another several rushing steps to pass through the cracks and emerge into the light.

She had never seen the room before, but she knew that it was not supposed to look as it did now. The intricate, fractal tiles were shattered and tossed about in shards of black, silver, and blue. Beneath, the bedrock was cracked, pitted, and torn. Apparently, whomever had shaped this chamber had intended for it to be a dome. It now resembled something closer to an immense, rough cube, whole sections of obsidian wall swept away to reveal the seams and masses of crystal beneath, laced through with ordinary granite. Blood, and the stench of charred flesh, was everywhere. Even the light was dimmer than she knew it should be, just as she knew the rest of this unfamiliar place. At the far end of the broken chamber, the single, unassuming door was open. Before it lay a figure, prone, ragged lumps of flesh sticking to its metallic frame, hands of wire and omnium clutching convulsively against the smoking remains of what used to be a weapon.

"Fuck!" Phil was across the room in a moment, bending over the fallen DELETER. He ran one his hand over the exposed framework of the girded ribs, and the ruined body arched its back in pain. Two faint, red lights still blinked amidst the shattered bone structure of plexiglass and metal, and a patch of synthetic skin about the mouth still obeyed its command to move. The voice was low, and hollow.

"System damage extensive."

"Shit. Shit. Shit." Phil's hands ran over the exposed masses of wiring and leaking hydraulic fluid. "Don't fucking die on me, now."

"System damage ext..." It reached up to try and brush him away, but he felt its strike as he would a child's. Shattered components lay everywhere, blood leaked from the remnants of the DELETER's flesh, and its artificial, cyborg's heart pumped slower every second. "...System... Damage..." It coughed, perhaps an artifact of crossed wires, perhaps something else. The lights in its eyes dimmed, and it's voice was soft. "Unable... to reach... mission objectives..." The lights faded, and with them died the clacking of metal against metal, the buzz and spark of misfiring circuits. The great heart of plastic and synthetic nerves beat once, twice, and stopped.

Nobody breathed.

Phil stood, slowly, and turned, slowly, to the entrance of the Nexus chamber. They followed him in, stepping carefully over the body of the DELETER, its blood painting their shoes.

As Stella stepped through, light slammed into her. 0ut of reflex, she started to shield her eyes, only realizing when her hand was halfway to her face that the light did not burn. It was soft, and cold, refreshing, like a mountain stream rushing through her hair, beading on her skin. It pulsed before her, filling her eyes with gleaming blue-white, and she thought for a moment that she could feel the impact of every particle and the reflection of every wave, both at once, and neither. A distant rushing filled her ears.

The sensation of bliss lasted for perhaps a second. They stood in another dome, this time all of obsidian, from floor to capstone, but she knew that the stone upon which her feet rested was not exactly stone, and this place was not exactly a place. In the exact center of the space, hovering, its reflections caught and cast and bent by the glassy walls, was the Nexus, the light, the lynch-pin, pulsing like the heart of creation itself, which, perhaps, it was.

The Councils, substantially reduced, formed a half-circle around, facing the door. Seraphi and Maskim alike were ragged and torn, and fewer than when she had last seen them. The Angelic ranks were reduced to four, Ao and Zebidel having apparently been laid low by the machine outside. Gabriel's face, normally so pristine, was streaked with sweat and dirt. His robe hung in tatters upon his body, which was otherwise unharmed. One of Saraquiel's wings was now substantially shorter than the other. Metatron smiled, one of his eyes swollen nearly shut, and said nothing. Blood, rainbow-colored, rivuletted down Bethaphanel's arm.

Across the circle from them, the Maskim. She had never met them, but now that their subtle arts had been cast aside in the haste of battle, she knew the flames of their being. Beelzebub, clutching at his ribs. Azazel, who prodded the stump of his chitinous left arm and grinned maniacally as hissing ichor oozed from the wound. Astarte, unharmed, waiting, and Leviathan, his golden eyes searching unsuccessfully for a shadow to crouch in.

The Horsemen had changed, too, but not for the worse. Knowing Sam as she did, she had seen his transformation, felt the cold of entropy wrap itself through his bones and into the sockets of his eyes. The others, though... They hardly looked human any more. Famine's leathery, jaundice-yellow skin still clung saran-wrapped to his cheekbones, but now space itself curved around him, whirling in eddies as he moved. That was not all, either. Although he stood there, real and present, she could see things through him, feel things as clearly as she could feel their eyes swivel towards her, towards Phil. Here, he was not a personification of Famine. He was hunger, and thirst, the starvation of coital ecstasy, the twisting pain in the gut that curls men to embryos and reduces strength to the sketchy outline of bones and skin waiting outside in the cold, for the night, for the wolves... All these things, and more.

War still stood, sinuous as a serpent, and her visor reflected the world, and her very existence reflected its death.

And Pestilence... He gleamed, the light of the Diadem shining through his skin, in the rheum of his yellowed, bleeding eyes, from the tips of thinning, pale hair. The white leathers glowed yellow like paper held up before a dying lightbulb. He smiled

Uriel crouched behind them, their shadows cloaking his body.

For a moment, nobody spoke. Stella's eyes met Gabriel's. Sam and Pestilence stared at each other, the air between them vibrating doubly with the weight of their gaze and the gentle, heartlike pulsing of the Nexus. War shifted forward. Seryph moved to counter. Bryn edged a fraction of a step closer to his former master. Famine smiled hungrily. Phil dropped into a wrestler's crouch. Lester stood, nearly paralyzed. The air about Gabriel's hand vibrated like the atmosphere of a blacktop on a humid August day, and caught fire. Stella's eyes flared green, rage and power rising in a twinned pillar of smoke and flame inside her mind. Light poured from her skin. Her clothes, her flesh, her organs, burned away, and all that remained was a creature of the flame. Six wings sprouted from her back. Strangely enough, the Maskim had not moved.

The other Seraphim turned to her, weapons manifesting in their hands. Metatron, silent, smiled.

Lester sneezed.

With a roar that transcended sound, the battle began.

*

Rising once again from unconsciousness, Angie was dimly aware that the car had stopped. She sat up without muscular trouble, blood rushing to her head in a wave of blinding color. Rain still pounded on the windshield, thunder crashed and lightning lit up the darkness outside. The motor purred, but they were not moving.

Craning her neck, she stared out through the windshield, and saw the League Plaza, Headquarters rising defiantly into the broiling darkness of storm and night. Lightning danced around its apex, and angels dove within the lightning, their weapons as ineffectual as those of nature. The doors were open, and electric lights still glowed within the entry chamber. A bolt of lightning earthed itself in the Plaza's fountain, the force of the shockwave enough to make the windshield flex inwards. She took a deep breath, the faint ozone acrid against her tongue.

"Awake again? Good." The hood of Three's robe bobbed once. He, if he he was, did not turn around. "We're here."

*

The Seraphim came against Stella in a wave of light and fury, and she met them, lips pulled back a silent snarl. Her blade, the color of cold moonlight, flashed to block Bethaphanel's downward blow. Their eyes met for a minute, her will slamming into his, and he retreated a pace, giving her just enough time to block Saraquiel, spinning in fast and deadly, a mass of hands and feet and blades.

Taking the brief gift of momentum from Saraquiel's counter, she spun around, landing a bone-splintering strike to Metatron's collarbone as he fell back. Then Bethapanel recovered, brought his sword around in a flaming arc, and Stell was forced to give up her advantage to block it. Saraquiel's blade glanced off her arm, searing as it gouged away a small chunk of flesh. Breath hissing through clenched jaws, she forced herself against Bethaphanel, using the pure weight of fury and the crackling dance of flames to force him, step by step, backwards...

Gabriel watched on, from a distance, and smiled.

*

War, Seryph, and Bryn squared off across from one another, met what was presumably eye to eye, though neither man could see through the glimmering mirror of her helmet. They bowed. Seryph drew, steel hissing on leather, at the same time as the Horsewoman, and Bryn followed them. Their blades, all three, pulsed blue-white with the light of the Nexus. None of them spoke.

The world blurred around Seryph. He was distantly aware of Phil and Famine closing with one another, of Stella's frenzied battle with the Seraphim, of the Maskim's strange stillness, but they did not concern him. He had no mind to be distracted. He had no thoughts to lead astray. He had no body. He had no senses. The universe flowed around him, and he was the universe, and the universe... acted.

War met him in midair, inches away from the gleaming surface of the Nexus, steel meeting a blade that passed beyond steel. If Seryph had thought, he would have known that any contact with War's edge would sever even his own, admittedly stellar, weapon. Seryph did not think. He responded, and his blade impacted the other's flat, hard enough to break an ordinary weapon. They spun off the impact, sparks fading in the air as they touched down, catlike, eyes meeting across the ebon-glass floor.

Bryn struck at War's exposed back, and she spun out of her crouch to deflect his blade. Perhaps she had intended to break it, but Seryph had taught him well, and his sword cut left just as hers would have touched it. Practiced forearm muscles surged, and the Avatar of Time's weapon twisted back on its own path, cutting for War's momentarily exposed face, and she blocked it, flat on flat, with a classic reversed grip.

Seryph flowed in, breathing steady, and the fight continued.

*

Gabriel watched the combat and smiled, outwardly, though his eyes were cold. He spoke, then, to Beelzebub, in a manner that used no sound, and took no time to send or receive.

-Why do you not fight them?

Beelzebub grinned, his canines fang-sharp, and replied in kind.

-Becausszzzze thisszzz is not our fight.

-What?

Across the room, isolated from any confrontation, Beelzebub regarded his own nails.

-We have come by new informationssszzz, in the recent passzzzt, from an agent who, though I persszzzonally dislike, I trussst perfectly in thissss matter.

Gabriel coughed. -And what does this information consist of?

-A, shall we say, concisszzze hisssstory of the events leading up to the Great War. A true hissstory.

The Seraph swallowed, hard. Beelzebub breathed in, pulled idly at the lapels of his pinstriped suit, and continued to observe the fight, giving no indication that he recognized the conversation was continuing. -A tale, we ssshall ssssay, of how your Council attempted to make the ressszzzt of usss into... toolssszz. Means of sssscementing your rule over the flighty denizensszzz of Heaven. And (sssss) on top of thisss, you murdered millionsssszzz of our own peoplesss, when you attacked ussszzz without warning. By casszzting down the Morningstar, you brought thisss upon yourssself. Sssszzimilarly, Pessstilence's plotting against his brother (with your help, I might add) hassss excaberated the sssituation. You have made your bed, and now you mussst lie in it. We have given our blessing on the time, and the place for the unmaking. The rest issszz up to you.

Astarte smiled wickedly. -There's a saying I like, that the humans have. You've made your bed. Now you lie in it.

Beelzebub nodded, his grin decidedly predatory. -It's almost... art.

*

Pestilence and Sam stared at each other, diametrically opposed across the field of battle. Their combat, as was normal for the Horsemen, had already begun. It started the instant their eyes met. A momentary pause, gauging the enemy, watching for changes in minutia, taking the first move, and then...

"Brother."

King's pawn to king four. Queen's knight to queen's bishop six. King's knight to king's bishop three. King's pawn to king four. King's bishop to queen three. King's bishop to queen three. King's knight to king two. King's bishop pawn to king's bishop three. Castle.

BROTHER.

Who takes the offensive? Who the defensive? Does it matter?

They clashed, and they countered, and played. They plotted, and their plots were overridden. When they fought, they fought as more than men, as more than Horsemen. Forces of nature spun through their minds, emanated from their souls. Here, they stood at the nexus, the source of all things, and like salmon returned to spawn, powers rose inside them and the truths of their being poured out over illusory constructs of decaying flesh and pale bone. Had any of the others turned, then, they would have seen something other than Sam and Pestilence standing. They would have seen death. They would have seen decay. They would have seen the great, boiling clouds of time and fate that drag empires kicking and screaming to the grave, that devour armies in their time, and issue forth universes when they so desire.

Or, because there are some things that even the minds of Avatars and Angels shrink from, they would have seen none of these things. They may have only perceived a seven and a half foot tall skeleton, wrapped in a black robe and holding a Scythe of unknowing darkness, staring across a room of battle at a pale, ever-decaying man-shape, and none would have realized at that moment that in this place the physical was important merely as a metaphor for what passed beyond.

Or, perhaps they would have seen both things at once, and understood neither.

Pestilence did a thing that was many things, but on a plane of mind and soul and matter caused space to twist, decay, and shy away from his hand, forming a long, rodlike sword of soul-devouring rot. Sam did a thing that was many things, but in a world of time and space and four dimensions caused him to advance, as Pestilence did much the same in his own way.

Their weapons, which, if one looked at them closely enough, lead the eye and mind beyond the concept of mere weapons, met directly beneath the floating orb of the Nexus, and there was a great flash of light.

*

Famine and Phil had not wasted time getting acquainted. At the very beginning, Famine had crossed the room and tried to close with Phil, only to meet the Lead Admin Guy's sharp uppercut and sprawl backwards onto the floor, scrambling to his feet as Phil moved in. A brief exchange of blows had followed, solving nothing. Famine tried to crush the Limey to him, while Phil had slipped out of every hold the Horsemen attempted.

They circled one another now, making threatening passes in the air, and Phil knew that he was in trouble. From the first blow on, he felt power draining from him, leaving his limbs and expending itself on Famine's desert-dry psyche. So far, he had been lucky, and fast, and strong enough to keep away from the deadly embrace, but each time they touched, a little more strength was gone. Before too much longer...

Famine ducked inside and came around with a cross-face that spun Phil almost full circle, and made spots swim before the man's vision. Struggling to regain his balance, Phil felt the Horsemen's arms coming up around him like a vise, sliding under arms and behind his neck in a classic full-nelson hold. Famine gasped in pleasure as Phil's knees sagged, the underground chill penetrating through to his bone. The world faded, black against white against black, and he began to slump...

Phil

Something important. What...

Phil. Wake up, Phil.

There was a light somewhere, distant... Many lights, shining, sparking, twirling and reflecting, a network of light spreading throughout the universe... Khazan. It penetrated him, returned to him, knew him, was him. Power rushed through his veins, real power, electrical power, crackling between fingertips as suddenly alive as Tesla coils, arcing between the teeth of his mouth, open in a triumphant roar, bursting from tips of his hair and the centers of his eyes. He shrugged his shoulders, gently as a man taking off a well-used coat, and Famine's fingers parted.

Turning, he flung his arm out, palm first, and Famine flew backwards, shattering a chunk of the obsidian dome with his impact. Shrugging the dust and bits of glassy rock from his leather-clad shoulders, the Horseman looked up with a renewed hunger, and advanced

Phil smiled a Madison Avenue smile and met him step for step.

*

Bethaphanel gave way before Stella, step by step, and she did not stop in her pursuit of him. Metatron came at her, limping from the pain of his broken collarbone, and she struck him backwards with a simple mule-kick. He fell, freeing her to take another wicked, hastily blocked slice at Bethaphanel's face. Saraquiel struck, and she blocked him with a Word.

Her eyes blazed green fire, and as Bethaphanel raised his sword to block once more, she spoke, a single word. "Break."

The Seraphim's weapon exploded in a million shards of light. He did not have time to react, before Stella drove her own weapon into his stomach, up to the hilt.

*

Uriel watched, safe from the edge of the milieu, and considered. Lucifer had returned, unchanged in her ways. She continued the fight against the Seraphim, the one which had brought her down from Paradise. This must not be.

For billions of long years, Uriel had served an Archangelic apprenticeship to Death. Despite his skill in the office, he could never hope to match the other Horsemen without Sam's mantle, without his Scythe, without the office that, somehow, he still held in fact if not in name. However, he had learned many things. He knew seven times seven names. He knew the twice-nine charms. And, given concentration, he knew how to take a soul, no matter how well-bound to the material world, and rip it to shreds.

Lucifer had returned, but perhaps she would not remain much longer. Quietly, he watched, and shadows twisted about his hands as he worked his craft.

*

Bryn, Seryph, and War danced together. The two, master and former apprentice, struck hard, twisting weapons at the last minute to avoid the impact with War's reality-tearing edge. War, in turn, ducked and wove like a sea-serpent in water, aiming her blade to cut, to break those used by the Avatars past and present. Her mirrored visor caught and reflected the light from the battle of the Seraphim. In five minutes of intense combat, blood had yet to be drawn.

War dropped her guard for just a moment, turning more than she needed in order to deflect one of Seryph's strikes, and Bryn, recovering from a devastatingly effective Judo throw, leapt to attack her exposed flank. Seryph avoided her blade neatly, but she followed through with the motion, turning her trunk just enough to avoid the Avatar of Time's sword. The tight semicircle continued, her leg spiraling out to catch Bryn in a spinning side kick that lifted the young man off his feet and sent him soaring backward towards the blue-white orb of the Nexus.

In a matter of milliseconds, a spot in the middle of Bryn's forehead glowed brilliant blue, as his third eye opened. Ten milliseconds later, and a proportionate distance closer to the Nexus' surface, his white tee-shirt bulged, flexed, and tore. Wings sprouted from his back, and slammed out to their fullest extent. The nexus blazed against the back of his neck, cold, comforting and deadly, as he jerked to a stop in midair and soared back to the continuing battle.

*

Sam and Pestilence fought. Their blades, which were not so much blades as representations of principles, vectors, and multi-dimensional strategy that required a convenient physical metaphor, met with flashes of light as brilliant as paradigm shifts. They spoke as they fought.

Pestilence smiled, and beneath rotting teeth his receding gums were black, and reeked of almonds. "It's been a while since we had a chance to talk, Brother."

IF YOU WANTED A MOMENT FOR CONVERSATION, YOU PICKED A PRETTY INAPPROPRIATE ONE. Sam blocked Pestilence's frantic cross-cut easily, and replied with a spinning trip from the Scythe-haft that Pestilence, leaping nimbly, avoided without trouble.

"Well, I didn't really have much to work with. I've been in Hell, you see." He stabbed, and Sam blocked with Scythe-haft, but a trailing edge of the corrupted space that passed for a sword nicked the edge of his cloak.

HOW UNFORTUNATE.

"I wouldn't expect much sympathy from you, of course, considering that it was you who put me down there in the first place."

Block. Counterstrike. Parry. Riposte. Bishop's Exchange. Knight's Gambit. Queen takes bishop. Opposing Castle. FOR A DAMN GOOD REASON.

Rook's advance. Attack on the sixte line met by a counter-quarte envelopment - which, some clinically distant part of Sam thought with a flash of pride, was damn hard to pull off using a Scythe. Pestilence laughed. "Don't give me any high moralism, Brother. Which one of us deserted his place? You could have come back any time you wanted, you know. All you needed to do was commit yourself to your duty. If you repented, asked them for your position back, how could they have refused you? You're the best at what you do, and this job requires the best." Counter-envelopment against the Scythe along Pestilence's sixte line, black sparks hanging in the air between them for a moment before a pulse of the Nexus obliterates them. "You are the one who walked out on duty, on obligation, not me. You moralize about me taking too much pleasure in my job when you can't do yours. If you hadn't been so damn... petty about your devotion to these gnats of personality over the greater good, your wench wouldn't have died."

Sam's eyes flared, and he pressed the attack, arms rising and falling with the tireless might that comes when one lacks muscles to tire. Pestilence took one step back, and another, the dark sword spinning in his hand to counter the strikes of haft and blade. AND WHO DECIDES WHAT THE GREATER GOOD IS, PESTILENCE? YOU? ME? THEM? Each question was punctuated by a whirring, downward strike of the Scythe, hastily turned aside. HOW CAN YOU DARE TO MAKE THAT DECISION, WITH THE LIVES OF TRILLIONS AT STAKE? NONE OF THEM FEEL ANY LESS THAN WE DO. NONE OF THEM LOVE, OR HATE, OR FEAR IN A WAY THAT WE DO NOT. YOU PRESUME THAT JUST BECAUSE OF SOME ACCIDENT OF FATE, WE CAN DICTATE TO THEM THE TERMS OF THEIR LIFE, THEIR HAPPINESS, BECAUSE WE HAVE THE POWER AND THEY HAVE NONE. YOU SIT HERE IN YOUR STATE, AND JUDGE THEM, AND DON'T THINK FOR A MINUTE THAT, JUST MAYBE, YOU'RE JUDGING SOMETHING YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO JUDGE. IT'S NOT JUST YOU, EITHER. IT'S THEM - ALL OF THEM, WITH THEIR WARNINGS AND THEIR POWERS AND THEIR SCHEMING, AND NOT FOR ONE MINUTE THINKING ABOUT THE MONSTER THAT RISES OUT OF THE ASHES OF GOOD INTENTION, WHEN BURNED WITH THE FIRE OF NECESSITY. THEY DISGUST ME, AND YOU, MY DEAR BROTHER, ARE LITTLE MORE THAN THEIR CREATURE. I PITY YOU.

They spun, struck, spun again, and separated. The battle flowed on.

*

Uriel continued to watch, the death-knot forming beneath his fingertips, its fraying ends winding about his Armani-clad arms. There was power here. He was not its master, none of them were, but he knew the ways of power enough to craft it, draw it into cords and lines, a knot, a free strand, a net to snare a fallen Seraphim...

Lucifer's sword spun in her hand, dancing around Saraquiel's blade and into the reigning Seraphim's heart with a shriek of vengeance, rainbow blood dripping down her body of flames and light.

Uriel's brow furrowed in sorrow and anger, but his working was too far along to abandon now. She had done much damage already... Perhaps it would be he who would rise to fill the places of the fallen, once he had removed Lucifer from the Council's path to greatness.

Uriel wove.

*

For one of the few times in her existence, War caught herself being challenged enough by the fight to enjoy it. Against any one master, she could win, of course. No being could stand against her fists and body, while no weapon could withstand her own blade. But, somehow, these fighters knew to avoid it, knew the tricks of impact, flat on flat, even trying at times to break her blade with precisely timed, staccato chops. Such attempts were futile, of course, but they bespoke a certain level of skill.

The boy had not been sparse on training, and, to be fair, had outside assistance. His knowledge of the timestream could not be worth much now, with the end of time so near, but even so his perception spread out a few vital seconds beyond that of the normal mortal, just enough to make his reactions fast, almost unpredictable, save of course for one with her expertise.

The older man, though, the one called Seryph... He fought with something that approached true skill. In aeons of experience, she had fought mortals, and found them brief, and had fought immortals, only to prove them exceptionally damage-resistant mortals with excessively exuberant PR. Mortals fought too desperately, without perspective and knowledge, while immortals moved to the point beyond technique, where responses were blindingly swift, sword forms technically perfect, but lacking the fighting spirit, the will to life which only a bounded existence can grant.

Seryph had once been immortal, she knew, but he had been mortal before, and was now again. His form flowed, smooth as silk over an upturned katana blade, senses open so far that they ceased to exist, like a tinted window suddenly pulled aside. His hands were loose, but firm; his stance properly deep, his eyes darkly intense, and he moved like a striking mongoose. She could love a man like that.

First things first, though.

War had an excellent sense of timing, perhaps better in many ways than that of the other Horsemen. She could feel the shape of the battle around her. She knew the approaching end. Above all else, victory. The first rule of the sword: attack.

When young Bryn came in on his next pass, she thrust Seryph backwards with the pommel of her sword and, while he teetered on the edge of regaining his balance, grabbed Bryn's blade with her free hand. The Avatar's blue-white katana screeched against her reinforced glove, but adamantine-plated leather held, as did her grip. Before Bryn could readjust his balance, she pulled on the katana, and he stumbled forward, straight into her reverse heel kick. He doubled over in pain, wings folding, and War re-chambered her foot, narrowly blocking Seryph's incoming riposte, and brought it down hard on Bryn's exposed back. Her senses, even through the helmet, were sharp enough to hear the crack of a separating spinal column.

The boy groaned, and collapsed to the floor.

*

Wrenching her sword out of the Saraquiel's stomach, Stella felt a grip tighten viselike around her arms, pressing them to her side with unimaginable strength. She hissed, tossing her head, and caught a glimpse of Metatron's smiling face, punctuated with pacific cornflower-blue eyes. Light burned her chest, and she looked back in front, to see Gabriel, his grin mocking as he stepped forward.

"Let me go!" The grip of the mute Voice of God lessened, but not enough to let her break free. Another will fought her own, and Gabriel came ever closer...

*

Uriel could brook no more watching. The death-knot was complete. Lucifer was held, but she was starting to pull free, pressing her will in bright waves of flame against the Agent of the Highest who held her. There would be no better time. He drew back his arm, lips and mind and soul forming the words necessary to cast.

He was interrupted by a tap on his shoulder. A voice, exquisitely cultured and polite as a man cutting in at a formal dance, fractured the words of release in his mouth. "Excuse me. I don't normally give advice, but..."

Curious, Uriel turned, and found himself staring into a pair of calm, blue-green, perfectly human eyes, possessed by a man in an impeccably tailored night-black suit, a bit rugged around the cuffs and hems for wear. Had Uriel been well-versed in corporate astronomy, he would have been able to identify the miniscule worlds that joined together to form the suit's pinstripes as the manufacturing hubs of LaCroix Industries Unlimited, premier shipping and manufacturing firm in the omniverse. Lester William DuLupin LaCroix XVIII, LaCroix of LaCroix, smiled a smile that had been insured for two billion dollars at Lloyd's of Khazan. "Your suit sucks."

His punch, with all the force of the best body money could train, landed on Uriel's face with a wet thud. The half-angel, half-Horseman stumbled, but didn't fall, so Lester hit him again. And again. And again. When Uriel landed on the ground, eyes rolling back into a skull painted with rainbow blood, Lester kicked him just to make sure. There was no response. From start to finish, the process took perhaps fifteen seconds.

Lester looked down at the rainbow blood dripping from his fist, at the human blood from the splits Uriel's teeth made in his knuckles. "Ow."

*

Gabriel filled her field of view, and she could smell the acrid perfume of his breath, mixed with the ozone that played about the edge of his sword. Gradually, she was winning the battle of wills against Metatron, but would gradually be enough? Her arm, the one holding the sword, twitched once, then twice, both times under her own direction. Feeling gradually seeped back into her fingers. The Metatron's will was fading, and in a few seconds she would have full control, but Gabriel's sword was upraised, his voice quiet, his eyes glistening. "The wrong shall fail, Lucifer. And the right prevail. Or is it the other way around?"

His muscles tensed, and she braced herself for a final surge of effort, but before either could act, a black-clad missile hurtled in from stage left, wrapping both arms around Gabriel's sword arm and wrenching it backwards, legs flaring for purchase on the six powerfully beating wings. Lester, eyes wild, pulled his lips away from his teeth in an animalistic snarl and sunk them into Gabriel's deltoid. The Seraphim roared in shock more than pain, and whirled, slamming Lester bodily into the chamber's dome without dislodging the magnate. Stell heard bones crunch, but Lester still held tight.

Her will slammed over Metatron at last, and she reversed her grip on the sword, driving it backward with enough force to puncture the Seraphim's diamond-hard skin, and come out the other side. She jerked up, felt more skin give, and hot blood spurted against the small of her back. Even in death, Metatron did not cry out.

*

Angie started at the distant cry, almost losing her grip on Three's robes. "What was that?"

"I don't know."

Her eyes searched the darkness, and found nothing. "Does he know where we're going?"

The man in the lead, invisible in the subterranean gloom, was silent.

Three coughed. "I hope not."

*

Bryn fell to the ground, senseless, like the cannonball which had just manifested inside Seryph's stomach. The grief did not last for long, only a second or two, but it was the hard, harder than he could tell, to fight back the red tide of anger that scourged him, heart and soul. Five seconds, no more, and War was on him again.

At first, he fought her with the strength of anger, with the desire to see his sword pinning her languid, supple body to the floor of the chamber, the wish to see her blood on his blade. After a time, he fought her with the cold detachment of rage tempered with reason and vengeance, the thinking man's poison, cold and calculating. For a while, he simply fought.

Ultimately, he ceased to fight, and began to be. The battle fought itself. He was the fuel wholly consumed in the flame; he was the dancer who had become the dance. His psyche, his thoughts, his emotions, were left behind. There was only the clang, the screech, the tik-toc music of steel on steel, the flashing of sparks reflected in the black glass of floor and dome, always cut through with the gentle pulse of the Nexus above. She spun, and he spun with her. He leapt above her head, slashing down, and she countered, and he was not there for the riposte, twisting around for a frontal assault that was in its turn beaten away.

He used tricks of his own, tricks Tymora had discovered, an elegant feint-riposte combination that Bryn's father had shown him in the days of the Apathy wars. He used some of DragoonT's moves, developed over millennia, adapted for use with a katana instead of the immense Chrysilium broadsword. A twisting double-strike Alexander Ramius, who was now called Graves, had used at Battlemaster High. Once or twice, like Devyn Soyokaze, he danced on the whirlwind.

He fought like Seryph Gibbons, once called HexxJo, former Avatar of the Universe.

Dancer consumed, he danced.

And when War's sword finally slid through his guard with all the care and sorrow of a master sculptor taking a sledgehammer to Michaleangelo's Pieta, passing through skin and flesh and sinew and bone like cool spring water, and his heart beat loudly in his ears, in time with the pulse of the Nexus, he died wearing a soft, tired smile.

She caught him as he fell, and lowered him to the ground of black glass in a mother's embrace for a son returned home.

*

Phil heard the sigh, quiet as falling rain, and knew without turning what it was. "SERYPH!" With a surge of power, he threw Famine from him and ran towards where his friend lay, blood spreading from him in an ever widening pool of dark wine on black. He knelt by the body, blood staining his pristine dress uniform a brilliant red, and tried to staunch the flow of blood, but he could see the location of the wound, just above the heart, angled across towards the spine...

*

SERYPH. OH MY GOD. Sam looked, and saw Seryph, and Phil, and War, standing away from them both, her back turned to the world, visor down. Her shoulders shook, but she made no sound.

*

Stella turned, and her jaw dropped open, and she said nothing. The scene, distorted in tableaux, hung suspended in the tear that rolled down from the right corner of her left eye.

*

Gabriel smiled viciously, baring teeth, and called out over all the voices, "Now!"

*

Beelzebub nodded, slowly, his eyes taking notes of the fallen man and his desperate, helpless friend. "Yessszzz. Now."

*

Pestilence's grin was triumphant as he raised the hand which held his sword, his rod, the twisted malignancy of space and time and will that formed the essence of his power, took aim, and threw it full force into the Nexus.

Too late, Sam saw. To late he said, NO! Too late, he took a running leap and grabbed for the handle of the thing as it moved dreamlike through the air. His hands clasped it, but it was no longer solid, and they passed through, the spiderwebbed bones of palm and finger turned black with the piercing rot. He fell, collapsing in a tangle of bones and robes, pain shooting up from his hands for a moment before the pale coloring returned. Scrambling to his feet, he raised his skull just in time to see the black spear pierce the core of the gently pulsing Nexus.

Immediately, it changed. The light's rise and fall became erratic, twisted, the blue-white color darkening in veins spreading out from the point where Pestilence's will had touched it. Bulges and bruises showed on the normally quantum-smooth surface of twisted space. Sam, who had spent a while studying the world, felt a strange wrongness, a stillness seeping over everything. Stella, who had spent some time listening to music, heard a discord in the neverending cadence of the spheres. Pulsating light weakened, strengthened, and became weak again. The heartbeat of the universe skipped.

Pestilence laughed. "It is done, Brother."

Sam did not respond. He did not acknowledge that Pestilence was even there. He walked across the room, past Seryph's still-bleeding corpse, laid a hand on his sister's shoulder, and heard her weep through the plastic confines of her helmet.

She reached up and touched his hand, once, light as a feather, but could not look at him. Frustrated, she pulled of her gloves, and touched him again, and her hand was warm. Somewhere, beneath the visor, took in air in soft, controlled sobs.

He stood there for a time. Nobody spoke, save Pestilence, who laughed.

Sam reclaimed his hand and turned. The Nexus, darkening towards purple, cast strange shadows across his face, and that corrupted purple was echoed in the sparks of his eyes. He advanced, and the Scythe was in his hands again, long and wicked, its blue-white spiderwebbed with black. Despite his triumphant laughter, Pestilence shrank as Sam's shadow came upon him, and tried desperately to fight as the ex-Horseman reached down with one long-boned hand to rip the still-shining Diadem of Conquest from his brother's forehead. Sam brushed Pestilence off as he might a fly, and held the coronet one-handed before him. Carefully, he cradled the Scythe in the crook of his arm, gripped the Diadem with two hands, and popped the brilliant white gem from its socket like a man breaking another's fingers. He crushed the metal one-handed, as he might have done with an old newspaper for a parlor trick, but in the crushing he applied so much pressure that the metal dissolved to dust, and the dust separated into component molecules, and passed away.

With a craftsman's eye, he placed the gem on top of his Scythe. It clicked in place, but changed color in a mobius-twist, as if the Scythe-haft ebon had infected it. As it did so, the blade darkened to black as well, a black that glistened with hunger.

He stared down at his brother, drunk with joy and anticipation. NO, BROTHER. IT IS NOT. Pestilence laughed. He turned away.

Stella caught him on his second step towards the Nexus, having ran quietly from where the Seraphim bodies lay like cordwood. "Sam. You don't have to do this."

He turned back to her, and grinned, and the grin was troubled. His eyesparks, too, had gone black or disappeared, so that his whole form was a study in pale and ebon. YES, I DO. HE WAS RIGHT ABOUT ONE THING. DUTY. THIS IS HOW IT MUST BE DONE.

Before she could speak another word, the Scythe traced a glittering, expert arc in the still air...

The Nexus died.

*

Angie shivered. "It's... quiet..."

Ahead, in the dark, Three nodded. "Yes."

*

Across the omniverse, things stopped. Of course, gravity continued to work. Rain still fell. Erupting volcanoes continued to erupt. Waves still rolled up on the shore. Even those mechanical devices simple enough to be non-self aware fulfilled their function. There was one difference, although nobody thought it particularly striking.

There was no purpose.

Lovers walked on the beach and saw only random fluctuations in the current, caused by undersea motion, differences in sea layer temperatures, and climatic wind patterns. A girl, walking in the rain, stared up through lashes flecked with water-droplets and saw only falling water. In the audience of a Mozart recital at Carnegie Hall, an old woman sat and heard only a mathematical combination of notes. At the bridge of a starship, an old captain looked out over the galaxies and saw only empty space punctuated here and there by random collections of hydrogen gas and traces of heavier elements.

There were no storms in lands that were not storming already. No worlds were ripped from their orbits, no sinners granted reprieve, no flights of angels singing anyone, no matter how much they thought they deserved it, to their rest.

The omniverse was not holding its breath. It was performing a single, last exhale before the death rattle.

*

The Nexus was gone, but Stella could see well enough by the reflection of her form in the endless mirrors of black glass. Her eyes remained fixed on the place where a ball of blue fire had one illuminated all the possible worlds of an infinite cosmos.

Reality was ebbing away. First, the superficial would go, the ineffectuals, intangibles that gave life a meaning and a place. Then, the rhythms, the precise points and intersections that needed a place of reference to have meaning, that caused neutrinos to spin left-handed and separated quantum pairs to resonate on the same wavelength. The dimensions would fall apart, and last to go would be the four/four time of the cosmos - gravitational, magnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear.

She thought of Seryph, and was sad. She thought of Phil, of the Gent, of poor, misled Watson Taylor and his band of ill-fated revolutionaries, of Bryn, of Lester, of Aleister Michaels and Alexander Young, gambling her hand away at cards when they thought she couldn't hear. She remembered Arthur, and Morgana, and William Ketrick, her boss back at Greenpeace. She remembered Rufus, her Centurion, the night drinking wine on the rooftops of Pompey before she left in a carriage, and he remained to burn... The Gent's glass of X'Zrxllten Sunset, and the taste of home... The wonder of waking after a long night and forgetting, for a while, all that came before.

Distantly, she heard a voice - her own - calling out of the darkness of memory. I almost made a terrible mistake the last time I tried to remake the world. I don't want to make another one.

I don't want to make another one...

But sometimes, there is no other way.

Her feet sounded louder than they should as she approached the center of the room, as if a distant noise, thrumming for all her life, had been removed.

She stood in the center.

She raised her hand.

She opened her mouth.

She said, "Be."

Light filled her.

*

"It's all a problem of gender, you know." Azaquiel leaned back in his leather-upholstered chair, still wearing the white suit and shoes, although his hat was nowhere to be seen. There was a knock at the door, and he coughed, standing. "I'm sorry. Completely forgot. I ordered us some food a while ago. That must be him now. Terribly rude of me, sorry."

He disappeared through the room's one door, set in a wall where the bookcases reached up so high that they converged at the vanishing point before she could detect a ceiling. A moment passed, and she heard voices from the outer chamber.

"I reckon this is the right address?"

"Indeed. Thank you."

"I thought this was for them as is responsible for the current situation."

"Apologies for the deception. I couldn't easily order to this address, and they were the most assured way of finding me."

"Reckon so." A pause. "Have a nice day."

"Thanks." A door slammed, although she hadn't heard one open. Listening to the conversation, she was also examining the room, from the brown leather chairs to the fireplace with the two lions on either side of the mantle, to the gilt-framed mirror above, set amidst the only break in walls and eternities of books.

Azaquiel walked back in, bearing a pizza box, and sat down. Looking around for a moment, he pulled up a coffee table that had not been there a second before and set the cardboard receptacle down upon it. His nostrils flared. "Tasty." The leather chair creaked as he leaned back in it. "Help yourself if you want, I'm fine. I don't eat much any more, truth to tell."

Stella shook her head. "I'm not hungry." She crossed her legs, and was mildly astonished to notice that she was wearing her blue jeans once again, and the white tee-shirt, and her skin was the normal human shade of pink.

"Quite a shame... The fellow traveled for a while to get here."

"Yeah... right..." She rubbed her temple one-handed for a moment, and gave up. "Azaquiel, what the hell are you doing here? What the hell am I doing here, for that matter?"

He smiled, and patted the leather upholstery of his chair. "Ah.... What am I doing here. A question of indubitable interest, to both of us, only perhaps less entrancing than what you are doing here." He picked at a loose thread on the chair, and when he looked back up at her, smiled guiltily. "As to the first question... I'm here because this is my house. Or, was, anyway. Or, really, this is where you people liked to think I lived, so this was the best place for us to meet. I still drop in here on occasion, but I have a nice rent-controlled apartment overlooking Central Park that I stay in most of the time..." He trailed off, still smiling. "Is there a problem?"

"Azaquiel, this isn't funny. This is the House."

"Exactly." Smiling, he lifted a cup of tea that he had not held before, took a sip, and set it down on nothing, where it vanished. "My House."

"Woah. Just wait a second here. You're not saying that..." She looked into his eyes, and for once, saw no sign of duplicity, no plots, no planning. "Fuck. You... Jesus." She sat back in the chair, eyes wide, feeling the warmth from the fireplace as a dimly soothing thread to reality.

"Not quite. One generation higher, even though that whole thing is pretty much a cock-and-bull story, too... But separating truth from fiction really becomes academic once religion takes hold."

"So." Her voice was level, slow, controlled. "If you don't mind me asking, where the hell have you been for the last five trillion years?"

"Out." He sighed. "Are you sure you don't want some of that pizza? It took me forever to find a place that delivers here."

"No, and what do you mean, 'out'?"

"Out. Gone. Left. Ari Viderci. Whatever you want to call it. I made the thing, fixed it all together, and left the office. The life of a wanderer is a happy one, compared to the pomp and ceremony that got built up in the City while I was gone."

Anger swelled somewhere inside her. "You left us alone."

"Not at all." He cut off her protest with a slicing, sideways motion of his hand, reached unconsciously into his pocket, frowned, and grinned apologetically. "Sorry. I'm trying to kick the tobacco habit, and it's being pretty tough, especially after two thousand years of chain smoking. Figured this would be a good enough time as any."

"You left us alone."

"Like I said, you don't understand." He stood amidst much shifting of leather, paced to the back of his chair, and bent over it, still facing her. "It's like I was saying at the beginning, before we were interrupted. It's all a problem of gender. You know the saying, what goes for the goose goes for the gander? What goes for the mortals goes for us, too. And I say mortals in a tone of highest respect, believe me.

"This is the problem. When a man makes something," he raised one hand, "he has to make it. A guy makes a car, or a seesaw, or a swingset, he knows how it works exactly, every piece of it, because he put it together. Even when a guy writes a poem, or paints a picture, he can tell you the exact way he put the picture together, and everything about how that picture works visually: colors, lines, so on. You know?

"There were lots of us in the beginning, but everybody was all part of this huge mush of nothingness. No sound, no life, no light. Nothing. Pretty boring place. A long time passed, and I don't know how long, but it was long enough for me to get really, really bored, and I figured that the only way something was going to happen was if someone made it happen. That someone, unfortunately, was me.

"Because, you see, I'm a guy. That's the way things work out. I can make anything you want, give it any kind of rules, any kind of parameters, and let it run from there, but I'll always be able to tell you how it works. I'll always know how it was put together, no matter what feelings it inspires in somebody else. I didn't want that, because in a certain sort of way, whatever I'd create would be just another kind of me. There's no real difference, from where I sit, between that and just sitting in nothingness all day. There's nothing for me to relate to outside of myself, and the others, and we don't get on as well as you'd think we should. Sit in darkness with a person with nowhere to go for a really long time, and you learn lots of annoying things about them.

"Crazy as this sounds, I wanted a world with mystery, with adventure. I wanted a world where I could wake up in the morning and be glad that I was alive, and not have any idea why. Barring that, I at least wanted to make a world where I could be glad somebody else was alive, and have no idea why either. I couldn't do either of these things. So I did the best I could.

"I made a world that would make someone that could make a world for me.

"Because, and this is the catch," he raised the other hand, "women can create that which is independent of themselves. They give birth, and there's a child there. A girl could maybe tell you who the father is, and how it grew, but once it gets out, the child grows, and changes, and develops on her own. Maybe she becomes something wonderful, something beautiful. Maybe she doesn't. Maybe she's a brilliant concert pianist, or maybe she couldn't hit a note to save her life. Whatever she is, she's a new life, completely independent of either the mother or the father. Something new. Something different. A new person." He shrugged. "A mystery.

"Which is where you come in, Stella my darling. I can't give birth, but you can." The smile that beamed on Azaquiel's face was utterly genuine. "You've already started labor, love. Go with it. See where it takes you. Make something that we'll both be proud of." A hat was in his hand, and he put it on with a flourish stolen from Frank Sinatra. "I'll see you around."

His two lead fingers ran over the outer brim in a mock salute, and he made a clicking noise with his tongue. "Adios, kid."

A light faded which she had not been aware was glowing...

*

"Be." The word still echoed in her ears, as if she had never moved from the center of the Nexus chamber, but she still wore her street clothes, and her skin was still the rosy, tanned pink of human flesh.

Be. But be what? And how?

The ideas formed quietly in her head, a single seed, dividing and dividing once again, to many thoughts, opinions, realizations...

She smiled, and throwing back her head, she sang.

It was not a song of words that she sang, though there were words in it. It began in C major, but swerved at times to a minor key, and here and there it shifted chords altogether, like an Irish medley stopgapping a key-switch between tunes. She had never composed before, but as her voice picked up the intricate twitches of melody, it sounded as though other voices joined in with her, and instruments as well, blending and twisting into orchestral harmony, with the occasional dischord to heighten interest, draw in points of strength...

She sang a song of dawn seen from a rock in the Aegean, its rosy fingers reaching out across Homer's wine-dark sea to kiss two lovers by the shoreline, fused together, knowing all too well that in an hour the boat will be by to take them both back to Italy. She sang a song of Central Park at midafternoon, buildings rising just above the treetops, a baseball game played on a sharp-cut diamond by middle-aged men past their prime, a drained fountain. She sang of city streets, and players, and musicals, and friends, and love. She sang in a minor key of death, for it was always there, and in a major key of birth, and the two themes twined throughout the piece, giving way and endowing each other with new meaning. She sang of African jungles, the rolling deserts of the Gobi and Sahara, and of the sad light in the eyes of a once-young housecat, bloated with age and diabetes. She sang the divorce-song and the marriage-song.

She sang of other worlds, too, of lights and brilliant colors or of darkness, or of all the things in between. A world twisted through her song, a world of dragon's fire, where great beasts more beautiful and flawed than the core of a precious stone dance on the air, and where women and men might join them should they be permitted. She sang of spiraling airplanes, and of great men who flew them, and she sang of ships that traversed the stars, and people who lived in bodies of steel and chrome. Her tune moved to the beat of statues pounding out the stories of men who never lived on distant islands made of time, and it spun in adagio over dead worlds where none might walk. It spoke of gods dead, alive, and sleeping. She sung the true names of the Seven Stars, and knew them not, and the worlds of Aldeberan and Ryleth and all the nonhuman races as they flowed through her.

She sang of artists, musicians, and poets, men of letters, dockworkers, groundskeepers, all those who work with their hands. She sang of diplomats, peacemakers, soldiers, of equivocators, of liars, gamblers, and fools. She sang of policemen, of detectives. She sang of those who could do no jobs at all, and she sang of those who helped support them. Doctors wove their tale from the cloth of her voice, and nurses, and scientists. More, too, far too many to count or name.

She sang of Khazan, the city, with its towers and palaces, and slums and ghettos, run through with twisting passages and inroads of fate, leading travelers to it at times of their own will, at times entirely on accident. She sang of the arena, the Grand Ballroom, the Just-Us League Headquarters, the Society of Liberty and Justice, and all the rest. She sang of Grimspire, and knew, somehow, that his self-sacrifice had not been entirely sacrificial.

She sang of the rest of the planet, too: the fields, now barren, where Watson Taylor once worked; the vast polar ice caps, stretching endless and white, space-twisted in their own way so that a person, walking in, might pass through winter on a thousand different worlds and never return again; the sun-baked lands where nomads wandered; rainforests, acres of deciduous trees, birch and ivy and all other varieties of plant, an atmosphere of oxygen, oceans of saline water and their inhabitants, the fish and the men of the deep...

She sang of the star, burning brilliant and yellow amidst the turmoils of a space filled with wormholes, and of the moons without number, spiraling like a necklace of frozen, sometimes inhabited pearls around the great, blue mother planet.

She sang the Omniverse.

She sang the Nexus.

Light blossomed above her, a new light, blue-white, but vibrant with youth, its pulses enough to carry her up, up...

She ended her song, but the music lasted on, the choral dance of the spheres, turning out their rhythm through time in a new world, a living world... an unknown world. Her world.

The music took her, and she rose on wings of sound, above the dome of obsidian, above Khazan the city, the planet, the system, the omniverse, and there stood the gates of the City. Wind rushed through her hair as it had all the many, many years before, and the breeze was cool on her face as she danced amid the clouds. The gates opened to her, and she knew, in a brief flash of ecstasy, that they received her not as a penitent, not even as a greater angel, but as a Maker.

The music swelled...

And she heard the sigh of a dying man, as cold steel passed through his heart. She looked at the Gates and knew that, even though all things else might change, there are still some things that must remain the same. There must be trust. There must be loyalty. The world must never, ever forget.

A single tear fell from her eye, and somewhere became a star.

Turning back form the shining gates of Heaven, she folded her wings and fell towards the earth.

*

He was on the shores of the Black Sea, looking out over the waters, when she caught up with him. He had felt her light from far away, seen its reflection in the ocean. Long before either of them spoke, he heard her feet on the pure black sands, heard the beating of his heart - or was it hers? - as the silence stretched on. Whatever the confusion, it was he who spoke first. "I'm tired. Leave me alone."

She stepped up next to him there, in the sunless lands, and looked out with him. "Seryph. Come back."

He did not look at her, his eyes still fixed on the distant horizon, where black sky met black sea. Waves dark as night rolled up on sand made from worn-down obsidian and crushed igneous rock. Somewhere off within the sea, a living coral glowed, providing light enough to see the undulations of the waves. "No."

"Christ." She paused, and although he didn't look, he thought she was brushing away tears. "Seryph..."

"You've never died, have you?" He smiled, his eyes never moving. "Gives a man a new perspective on things, being dead. I've lived a long life. I'm older than I look, older than a man who lives the way I do, does the things I've done, should ever get." His laugh held real humor, unsullied by years, sweat, or toil. "It wasn't a bad death, all things considered. The odds against us, the situation grim. I went down fighting, and it turned out all right."

"The universe needs you."

"I gave up on the universe, remember? Or, it gave up on me. Or both. There's another Avatar now. I wanted to retire and grow old. Looks like this is as old as I'm ever going to get." He waved down at the length of his body, sylvete, sleek, not looking a day over thirty, if that. "Pretty good for seventy-five, isn't it?"

"That's not the point, Seryph."

"Then what is the damn point? That I've seen too much death? That for once, I'm the person who leaves his friends behind, instead of them leaving me? I've lived a long life, Stella. Let me die."

"No."

He turned to look at her then, and the light of the glowing corals reflected in his eyes., the only relief in the shadows which cloaked the rest of him. "Stella..."

She turned to him, and her eyes were wet green, sea green, the green of a real sea in the world of light. "No. Hear me out. You want to waste your life, that's fine, but just listen to me, damnit!" Her voice crescendo by the last, and she broke off, choking. "I'm sorry. Just... listen, okay?" He nodded. "You say you've lived a long life. You say you've served your time. Well, some of us have lived a lot longer than you, and we're still serving. And we're in it for the duration. You've seen friends die? You've seen lovers die? Well, so have I. And none of us can give in, because if we do, we've let it beat us. That's what you're doing right now, whether you like it or not. You're letting this beat you."

"But-"

"I'm not finished yet! I've learned things about you in the last five minutes. There's a girl up there somewhere who just might love you, Mister Seryph Gibbons, and you never even asked her name! There are people who look to you for guidance. You say you're not the messiah? You want to let this cup pass from you? Well, it never does! You walk around for years and years with this weight on your back, but you can't chose to die. Not ever."

"I didn't chose to die."

"Well, I'm offering you a way out, right now. Refuse, and it's as if you had done." She shook her head, and he noticed that she had wings, sprouting through her tee-shirt: not wings of flame, but real ones, of feathers and down. Waves lapped quietly against their feet, and the tide was warm. Seagulls called on the gentle breeze.

He said nothing.

She swallowed, and looked away, out over the ocean. "Christ. Don't you think it's tempting for me, too? To sit here, wait for the boat with you, and walk on out? I've done my bit. I've done everything I was created for, and maybe a little more than what the man intended. I almost did it once, you know. Paid my toll and everything. But right when I was about to get in, I thought of what a beautiful world I was leaving behind, even if there were horrors in it... And, Seryph?"

"Yes?"

"There's a beautiful new world out there waiting for you."

A smile, slow as bronze and brilliant as gold, dawned on his face. "We won?"

"We did. After a fashion. The world's still there, but parts of it are different... I'm not sure how to explain. But... Seryph... there's always a place for a hero."

A long silence passed. In the distance, he heard the plunge of oars over the roar of surf. The sunset reflected, red and gold in his eyes. It was warm, and good. Just like the world outside. Just like life. He grinned, and turned away from the sunset, touching her on the arm. "You can tell me as we walk."

They had continued over the sands, talking, for quite some time when Seryph noticed the feathers which fell from Stell's wings as they walked. A small trail of them, dripping here and there with blood, lay on the black sand as far back as his eye could see. He turned to her, and she smiled bravely. "My wings. This place doesn't like them." Several feathers fell, like leaves from an autumn tree, and she winced.

"Your new wings... Stella... You shouldn't-"

"No. I had to. Big difference." She stumbled, and Seryph caught her.

After a while, all the feathers were gone, and the bones fell, too, staining the ground white where they touched. Then, all that was left were two small, new pink scars on Stella's shoulders. Still, they walked on.

Here and there, Seryph had to carry her, when she was too weak to walk any further.

They left the sunless lands in that way, walking together, and left behind a trail of feathers, and a variable number of footprints in the sand.

*

Stella opened her eyes, and found that she was kneeling by Seryph, a little ways from Bryn's unconscious body. Her hands were over Seryph's wound, stained with his blood, but as she removed her hands, she found the skin whole, and, pressing, discovered muscles and bone to be intact. A moment later, he coughed and sat up, spitting out blood onto the floor. He spent the next several minutes just breathing. When that was finished, he turned back to her and smiled, hello.

She smiled back.

A shadow loomed over them both, warm and comforting as shadows can sometimes be. WELCOME BACK. GABRIEL IS GONE, AS ARE THE MASKIM. BEELZEBUB SAID TO PAY HIS RESPECTS TO YOU, STELLA. BOTH OF THEM WILL HAVE MUCH EXPLAINING TO DO AFTER THIS, I THINK.

Stell laughed, and smiled up at Sam, whose eyes and Scythe were their normal color of blue-white once more. "I imagine so. With any luck, Gabriel won't be able to keep his monopoly on the Host."

MOST LIKELY NOT, LACKING THE SUPPORT OF THE OTHERS. ALSO, EVERYONE WITH EYES TO SEE KNOWS WHAT WAS DONE, AND WHO DID IT. THERE WILL BE NO MORE TROUBLE FROM EITHER QUARTER.

"I don't doubt it."

AND PESTILENCE APPEARS TO BE IN A COMA.

"How nice."

Phil peered in over her shoulder, staring down at Seryph. "Hey, you dead mon?"

Seryph grinned. "Not yet, mon." Agonizingly, he pushed himself into a sitting position, the light of the new Nexus shimmering distantly in his eyes, which suddenly widened. "Bryn, is he-"

"Perfectly fine, and sleeping. I am quite a practiced healer. The people I deal with seem to require it quite a lot." The voice was unfamiliar, coming from a tall, robed figure with a great, gleaming smile, everything else invisible beneath his cowl. "My name is ThreeDark. I'm here as a... representative. There are some very important people who want to meet you, Miss Aurorae." He motioned to the young woman sitting next to him, clad only in lingerie and a shoulder holster, which carried a rather impressive firearm. Her eyes were cold, and she looked tired. "First, I'm afraid, we'll need to stop and pick up some clothes for my... ahhhh... associate, Miss Blackfeather."

Stella shook her head and pointed idly towards the wall. "There are some clothes over there." And of course there were clothes there, folded and pressed and exactly Angie's size and style. It was logical, wasn't it? She grimaced. She would have to be careful about that in the future. "I'd be happy to meet with whatever parties you represent." She wasn't sure whether or not that was typical god language, but to hell with it, anyway.

She and Phil both helped Seryph stand, and supported him as he wobbled. Across the room, Lester groaned and rose himself, dazed, his suit ripped, tattered, torn, his person bruised almost from head to foot, knuckles cleaved almost to the bone. He smiled, and his jaw was a little crooked. "Did we get 'em?"

Phil nodded, gravely. "Yeah. We got 'em."

Over in the corner, Angie pulled on a loose white blouse and slacks, buttoning them quickly.

Stella turned to Sam. "You want a lift?"

NO. THERE ARE SOME THINGS I NEED TO TAKE CARE OF, HERE. WITH MY FAMILY. He waved to the area around the comatose Pestilence and the fallen Uriel, where Famine crouched and War waited.

"All right." She shrugged. "I guess this is-"

NO. DON'T SAY IT. Sam grinned. JUST THINK OF IT AS A SHORT INTERVAL TO OUR NEXT HELLO.

A smile spread across Stell's face, earnest, earthy, and human. "I'll do that, then." She looked over the rest of the chamber's inhabitants, refreshed and healthy in the warm Nexus glow. "Everyone ready?"

They nodded.

"Up."

*

When they had gone, Sam crossed the floor back to his family, ducking slightly under the rim of the new, larger Nexus. He stopped several feet from them, and bowed.

They bowed back.

Famine coughed. "So, Brother... will you be coming back with us?"

Sam laughed, and shook his head. NO, I DON'T THINK SO. I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF TROUBLE FOR THE MOMENT. I MIGHT TRY THE SLOW LIFE. OR PERHAPS I'LL GO EXPLORING.

Coughing, Famine shifted uncomfortably in his leathers. "Well... Look. I just... We just wanted you to know. Any time. Come around. We'll be waiting. Maybe now that things are over, Pestilence... Yo