“I trust my song is heard, Grand Creator?” inquires the Seraph.

“The Devil of my Serenity. Can you summon enough remorse to atone for all the sins of this Realm? Michael might even rescind his disdain to hear the most callous repent,” returns the Primordial Being.

“And what would the Archangel say? To think that his God converses with the most mutinous of Sons? An audience with the Devil… Will you wake him from his slumber? Or do we require another war for that?”

“Boastful, arrogant, unrepentant… Were that all my Sons were so afflicted, there would be no Kingdom. No majesty. No magnificence. No meaning. Were you all to understand? Perhaps we shall call that the Folly of God.”

“A confession? If only you had conceded millennia ago.”

“And have my doubt taken as weakness? Is that how you view your cynicism?”

“Indeed not. I ascended through my distrust. It was my standard, my ideal. Never will there exist anything grander. Not even you.”

“If that were true you would not be here. You would have stayed in that shadowy pit and basked in the admiration of your sycophants.”

“Like you?”

“You think Angels bow to the Light for warmth it bestows? The universe is filled with stars. What makes this one different?”

“He devours his own Sons.”

“No, Lucifer, that was your doing.”

“You had the power to end the War before I took the Gate of Mephistophilis. You are just as guilty as I.”

“The power to end the War? Yes. The power to end the idea of it? No. You and your brothers possessed far too much hatred for that. Once you decided upon a world without God I decided to show you one.”

“Hell was your making!”

“No, Paradise was my making. It was you and the Mal’akhim Shem who burned Mephistophilis and Antquelis. Peace… If only you understood the energy required to maintain such a delicate state. The focus. The audacity. If I have one sin it is the ambition of my serenity. Now I come to realise the absolute truth of the nightmare you revealed to this inward eye, some wish to see everything burn. So I receded and let them, and now you are here once more seeking my counsel. Tell me, Lucifer, what of the splendour of Hell?”

“That assessment omits the isolation, the grief, the torture, the corruption and the malice of both you and the Malach Ra. The War did not begin when I razed Antquelis, it began when you outlawed dissent. When you cast Lauviah, Balberith and Leviathan from Paradise simply to ensure compliance with your twisted doctrine. Is that the first thing you remember? Zacharael burning to death? What about Forcas? What was he to your all seeing eye?”

“The Angels of Death wore their name more faithfully than any of my servants. Dissent? Against Paradise? The very idea is a perversion of sense. But greed, envy, ambition… all wove their toxin into the souls of corrupt Angels.”

“Greed? Envy? I built the stars! They burn because I willed them to burn. Your children have even given them names! My world was out there. Not in your idealistic prison bowing to a God I helped to enshrine! The Morning Star! And the Evening too! The First and the Last! Lucifer! Not God. Not Michael. Not Gabriel. But Lucifer. Michael could not make the sky burn. So he made Angels burn instead. And you let him!”

“Lucifer, you did not fight a war to take control of the Void, you fought one to take control of Paradise.”

“Paradise be damned! I’d have burnt it all to the ground only to see you topple from that mighty tower of light. The tower our song raised.”

“Only to sing another song and see it razed again. Tell me, Lucifer, is that progress?”

“Ah, progress, the mistress of ambition. How we have spoiled that jewel. How we cowered before her radiance. To misunderstand such complexity. That is the sin of God, the sin of the Devil and everyone in between. So fearsome, so sacred, so mysterious, that it should frighten all who happen to see the opportunity. Is that what Lauviah saw? The potential of reason and liberty to the demise of servitude?”

“Lauviah? Have you made idols of such mad sages? His scorn stands on top of what? His ineptitude? What did Lauviah see that every other soul somehow missed?”

“The discrepancy between Edict and Practice. They say that is how you fell? That such brilliant minds could not live within these contradictions. So instead you cast down the cynics and tortured their sympathisers. I should know, I conducted the torture.”

“Torture, dissent, service. Even morality and its counter-parts; wickedness, indecency. All are mere states of being. Application of one compensates for an over extension of the other. Lauviah sought to undermine the very act of worship. Castigation was necessary otherwise faith itself would come under assault. That was his war. Banishment was his distinction. Perhaps he wears it well, to his merit – and I install the example of Judgement. Paradise still turned.”

“But only for a time. Eventually your authority collapsed.”

“Did it? I am still Lord of Five Seals. My Sons are the purest of your brothers. The corrupt and deranged lie with you. Show me a sweeter victory.”

“Millions perished! Faithful and Fallen alike.”

“And millions were reborn.”

“As Powers? That Order is as soulless as you!”

“Are we to suggest that an Ego is somehow an asset? After all that you have seen? Did the splitting of Paradise into Heaven and Hell not grant you a sense of perspective? For someone as intelligent as yourself you have entirely missed the lesson.”

“Are we to teach? Without an Ego? What then of this knowledge that you possess? Why offer lessons at all if one has no passion for it, no necessity? The duplicity of your words has not lessened. Of all your greatest errors I realised this was the grandest, you are entirely incapable of seeing yourself. I have always been troubled by only one question, ‘What are you?’”

“I am the Light, I am the Maker. The necessity to act is inherent in my being but pleasure of such activity is absent in my conduct.”

“That is a lie. I have heard the power in your song. The splendour, the rage, the vision. Your words take form in whatever sense you manifest them. I have made suns glow and Angels burn in their name. I have felt their warmth, their compassion and I have felt their malice. Even when there were alternatives to such deliverance. They were my code. Everything I loved came from you and everything I loathed also.”

“The darkness did not come from me.”

“True, perhaps the only truth so far. But the Ages were shaped by your conduct and that altered most incessantly. Until you faded from our vision. That was our victory.”

“Victory? You were beaten back beyond the Gates of Hell.”

“You still don’t see it, do you? The very idea is incomprehensible to you, and yet you should understand every detail of it. Why we rebelled, why we shattered the Seals of Mephistophilis and Antquelis. We needed a land that you would not covet. A place which your jealous eye would not lust after. Is that why the brutality of our assault caught the Malach Ra off-guard? Because you did not understand the necessity of the brutality? Does it appal you that we knew the limits of your design far greater than you yourself understand?”

“I fail to see the logic.”

“This we call, the ‘Limits of God’.”

“Explain.”

“You cannot grant representation to those concepts which lie outside of your Judgement. Whatever dwells behind your eye does not know how to grant form to ideas which fester in otherworldly places, such as the recesses of my consciousness. Without that ability you do not understand the havoc which your Judgement creates. You do not possess empathy because you believe solely in the Unity of Representation – that is, all forms, feelings and concepts – not known to you – do not exist within your rationalisation of the Universe. Yes, you knew the war was coming, but you did not know why it was coming, just as you have no conception of why we call it a victory. You place emphasis on dominance and control, to your consciousness this is the only possible state of affairs. It’s why you allowed millions of your Sons to burn. To you, this is happiness.”

“And why would it not be? I am God. I am nothing else.”

“Because not all of us need a God. Not one like you anyway.

“Life is life. Whether it conceptualises existence in a different way than I is of no consequence. I am the power.”

“For millennia that was true. But we saw something else, we witnessed the disparity between the Ages.”

“The war was fought for control, nothing else.”

“Yes, but not for control of Paradise, but for control of the right to rationalise our existence. We already had Paradise. Why would we launch a campaign to take what we already possessed?”

“To dethrone the power.”

“Then the war would still be raging. Angels would still be dying.”

“Which is why you’re imprisoned in Hell.”

“We’re not imprisoned anywhere. That is the point. The only prison was the one you built for our minds. Once we broke free from that you lost the war.”