The Bride of Heaven

Ch 1 - Song of the Forgotten

I heard the flute before I knew
I still had lived to be;
that dancing, beguiling song
bewitching and enthralling me.
I thought it my friend in Heaven
and knew myself in Hell.

I opened my eyes and saw the creature I knew best to fear. A demon with curling horns and garnet skin gazed at me with dark glares of death and doom.

I gasped and screamed, and he stepped back over his forked tail as though frightened.

I was lying down upon a marble block cool and white, in a room dimly lit by the pale light of candles standing in puddles of wax. I lifted my hands to look at the white satin that clad my forgotten body, a dress rich in embroidery and encrusted with gems.

"Who am I?" I asked before pressing questions flooded my head. "Where am I? How am I here?"

"Where you are you know already," answered the demonic stranger with eyes slit like a cat's and a tone that spoke more than I could read. "Who you are is for you to decipher, and what does it matter how this came to be?"

The air smelled faintly of sulfur, and the walls were made of the darkest obsidian. The world was not as I had known it in my sleep, and with that world of dreaming departing, every part of the old me disappeared. Whom I became was made clear to me by the great flock of people that proceeded to pour into the small space.

Guards and gawkers, patrons and passers-by all peeked in, smiling amongst themselves when they spied my open eyes with their wide-held ones. Past them stormed a dozen women in dark gowns and with pinkish skin, without horns yet with crowns of curling hair. Each bower her head at the demon as they entered before gathering about me with bewildered looks.

What was gasped, what was sung and spoken around me that fateful day, in every light and shadow, was the same four little words, over and over again. "The Bride of Heaven!" "The Bride of Heaven is awake." "The Bride of Heaven is with us!"

Some sprung to deliver this news to distances I could not fathom. Others gasped it and smiled, and a few held looks which said they had heard more than the rest.

"What is the Bride of Heaven?" I asked the clamoring crowd, but the demon would only glare into the depths of my eyes and soul, and the attendants hurry on, washing my arms and brushing my hair with sweet-scented water.

Voices less enraptured came to explain the matter, wise old sages turned slow with age, all of them without horns. The demon never left us for long, always watching nearby.

The Bride of Heaven was a being long prophesied. A woman, a queen, who would reign over darkness and bring light where the sun shone on no one. She was a bride since she would share the throne and destiny of the guardian of the gates, the great Grand General, the keeper of the kingdom. She was his only equal, she who slept a thousand years and awakened to save his soul.

She would lead armies through veils of fire, bring down the skies and raise the earth, challenge great kings, and win ageless wars. She who had slept in eternal slumber would usher in an era of unforeseen splendor, where her people would be free and her kingdom spread to the far corners of the world. She was the light, she was the true divine, she was one and many, all and nothing.

And now, I was to be her.

I was paraded around the kingdom—around Hell as I knew it, or the Underlands as they called it. It was a country carved into stone, with streams of molten lava running through its cities, casting a low light over all. Its inhabitants were friendly and smiling, clamoring toward the procession as I was carried past in a chaise raised high above their heads. My feet were never to touch the ground, and for that I was soon grateful as I saw the bursts of steam that rose from beneath the hooves of the multitude as they hopped from one side to the other.

Wherever I looked, I was greeted by smiles of razor-sharp teeth in heads covered in dark curls or untamed locks, some with horns, others without. I was the only one whose veins ran blue and not ruby red, yet no one seemed bothered. No one minded, no one thought less of me. I was celebrated, universally adored, however different I was from their look, however lost in their darkened world.

I was brought to a great house of holiness built to impress, its walls being pristine white against the black rock. It was tenderly decorated as though made of lace, and its windows glistened high above like something I had once sought in the skies. Seemingly every soul in the kingdom had gathered there before the sacred space. Between crowds clamoring on both sides, the attendants walked me in, I the subject of all adoration. Gemstones were cast at my feet, forming a sort of splendid gravel, and foreheads touched white marble in reverence as I passed by.

The building opened inside to reveal a magnificent church. Its walls were painted all over with scenes of battles and meadows full of wildflowers. A golden carpet spread before me, toward an altar where a beam of light shone over a painting of storming skies and splitting earth. The pews were full of smiling faces, curled hair and curved horns everywhere. The congregation broke into a song at the echoing of my first step, and bells rang all the while as I walked across the chanting space, the name of the deity there dwelling lightly on my lips, finding no form.

There at the altar was he, that demon in dark robes, standing in the shadows beside the ray of light. He held out a hand toward me, a broad, crude, steadying thing. I laid mine on it, and his long fingers curled around mine.

The clouds in the altarpiece turned steadily, the figures breathing and heaving in the wind that washed over the scene. Two figures there were in total, one raising above, the other sinking below, and so real were both that my hand rose to touch them, meeting cool glass where it expected mist. I could hear it, the whooshing of the wind, the screaming of the skies, and the crying, whose crying? Was I crying?

The song finished behind me, a poem beside me, and the demon gazed at my features lit in the light with a look of dread and dreaming. "Will you take your place where you belong," asked he, that harbinger of everything terrible, "or will you be lost to the world that knew you?"

"I will go wherever I belong, of course," said I with my hand still between the painted figures, and the poem went on.

"Then repeat my every word," instructed the evil creature. "This is my will, this is my decree."

"This is my will, this is my decree."

"Formed freely and without coercion."

"Formed freely and without coercion."

"'So says I', then add your name."

"My name?"

"Your name."

"I do not know it." I let the trapped people be and turned to the demon with laughter loose on my lips, the beam of light gently on my face. "I do not know who I am."

The poem and song broke off, and the smiles turned to pitying frowns.