Lastly, Lucifer called out, “Nergal! I call you last. Are you and Shadella and your group of angelfolk safely accounted for?” Silence greeted his question. “Nergal? Nergal! Shadella was with child. Are you both here?”
A loud masculine wail shattered through the blackness. “Damn our Creator, who has stolen Shadella’s unborn child from her very womb! We are here, but our child is not! Shadella’s womb is flat, as if it had never blossomed with my seed! Daughter or son, I know not, but know that I have been robbed and my wife’s heart torn into pieces of pain.” A woman’s incoherent wail matched his cry.
“Nergal!” Lucifer shouted above their outcry. “Nergal! My heart grieves for your and Shadella’s cruel loss. But you must calm her and yourself. You are also indebted to the folk you took as your charges. They will be like your children now, until you and Shadella can again conceive. Put aside your grief until there is time for it. Call out to your people!”
“My people?” Nergal’s voice sounded drained of emotion. “Very well. Until there is time for grief.” He called his charges. They answered not only with their names, but with murmurs that consoled him and Shadella.
Lucifer nodded to himself, invisible in the blackness. “Lastly, I call to my own. Affaeteres?”
“I am here, Lucifer, but I cannot see where you stand.”
“No one can see. Ashtoreth?”
“I am here, Father. And Mother is beside me. We arrived here together. I was holding her. Protecting her.”
“And your brother? Bael?”
No answer.
“Bael?!” Lucifer waited, wondering if his second son had been taken from him, just as Azmodeus, his youngest, had been. “Answer me, if you are here!”
A second more of silence, then a soft mutter. “Bael is present, but his heart is lost.”
* * * *
Lucifer looked up, mid-memory, glancing at Leianna, who asked, “If there was a volcano in the distance, wouldn’t its lava flow create some light?”
“It didn’t freshly erupt until perhaps an hour or two later. Time was difficult to judge. And then we had a better sense of place and space.”
Bael added: “There are stars in the Netherworld, a cold, faint light, but no moon. We later found that the volcano, one of many which originally dotted the landscape, had erupted earlier and the ash in the Netherworld sky obliterated the weak starlight.”
His father spooned up a bit of mousse, savoring the taste, then said, “Why don’t you tell of the rest of that first night and morning in Hell? After all, you were the star of the show! Despite your distraught state of mind, you acquitted yourself honorably. It was the catalyst that caused me to name you my second-in-command and heir.”
“Immortals need no heirs, Father.”
“I am less sure of that now than when I bestowed the honor on you. However, you still carry the title. And I again request that you continue the story for Quatama and Leianna. I weary of telling it.”
Bael sighed, wondering about his father’s real motive, and reluctantly continued the tale of their arrival in Hell.
* * * *
He felt as if the blackness entombed him, that his father and the others spoke to him from an immeasurable and unreachable distance. He knew that a part of his very soul, his Leianna, had been taken from him, and if a foreseeable future awaited him, she would never share it. Before Lucifer’s fall, during the events leading to it, the elven matriarch Chamira had warned Leianna and Bael: do not allow yourselves to be separated. But perhaps Chamira knew that their best efforts to safeguard their love, to not be torn apart, would fail. Perhaps that was why she had Elijah, the young spirit master, speak of a prophecy to Bael, Leianna and Ashtoreth.
If the prophecy was valid, countless eons would pass before he and Leianna could reunite. Until then, she was lost to him.
He had forced himself to answer Lucifer. He didn’t want to be here in this astral wilderness, he didn’t want to face this horrid exile. He wanted to die, as those earthly mortals did, and forget he ever existed.
And then he heard the screaming, a woman’s high-pitched wail, sounding somewhat familiar. Her voice gave proof to some unseen horror afflicting her.
He heard a man call: “Sharlan?! Where are you, daughter?” Bael knew it was Lothan’s daughter whose cries pierced in the black void. Another woman cried out, “Lothan! Our daughter! Help our daughter!” He heard the sound of Tia’s hysterical weeping, fearful and not knowing what danger their daughter faced.
“Something has hold of me, Father! Something with scales, standing upright! And claws! They cut me! Oh, Creator!” Sharlan screamed again.
Bael moved towards her, trying to gauge her voice, calling, “Try to get away, Sharlan! Try to find the rest of us. Curse this darkness!”
He brushed against another body. “Who is it?”
“Ashtoreth. Mother is beside me.”
Their mother spoke in a resigned whisper. “If only we had light. Dear Creator, do not abandon us completely!”
Peals of thunder louder than any they had ever experienced drowned out all other sounds. And then they knew it was not thunder, but the rim of a mountain top, perhaps as distant as a valley’s length from them, bursting outward and upward with fire, smoke and what seemed a river of burning water, the color of bright flames, sweeping out in wide swathes and thick rivulets down the mountainside.
Its heated glow produced a faint visibility, and they saw what creature attempted to drag Sharlan off. It was small, reaching only to her shoulder, and reptilian, a sort of upright lizard, its tail snapping back and forth, the thin lids of its eyes shutting and opening rhythmically, turning towards Bael, as it pulled the struggling girl along.
The fallen angels clustered near one another in a loose circle, but at its perimeter, Bael saw other lizard creatures. They huddled and watched the progress of their bolder member’s attempt to capture the screaming Sharlan.
Lothan, his daughter’s distress now visible, grabbed the creature furiously. He attempted to pull it off. But its thick claws were embedded in Sharlan’s arm, tearing her flesh. “Stop it, Father!” she shrieked. “It’s tearing me apart!!” But Lothan didn’t seem to understand, Sharlan’s arm hidden from him, between her and the creature. And now one of the other creatures moved stealthily towards another of the women angels.
Bael rushed forward, facing Lothan. “Stop pulling the creature. Its claws have a hold of her arm.”
Bael raised both of his hands and dug his fingers deeply into each of the creature’s eyes. It howled, a furious honking sound, and released its short but powerful forearm’s grip on Sharlan, its small paws sweeping up to its ruined sight and then blindly outward to attack Bael with its claws springing out again. He clenched his teeth against the pain it caused to his own arms and withdrew his fingers from the reptile’s eyes, now pounding its face between its nostrils until he heard a crack. The creature stilled, sinking down to the rock-strewn ground, twitching.
He felt Sharlan touch his back. She wept, her long, black hair tangled and disheveled. “Thank you! Oh, sweet friend, thank you!” She touched the wound on her injured arm carefully. “I will need healing.” She looked at Bael’s own arms, lacerated in ugly, parallel rips. “So will you, again,” she said, reminding him of his earlier injuries, before the Seraphim exiled them from Eliom, when he tried to reach Leianna and met an invisible barrier that burned him.
Other shouts echoed from the rim of the clustered circle of angelfolk. The men had found large stones and were aiming them with deadly intent at the lizard creatures, targeting their eyes, skulls and necks. One, nearly upon a woman it had chosen as a victim, went down, yellow fluid spraying from its torn neck. The other creatures retreated now, running off shrieking