God's Gone AWOL

[Bonus Features] An Impromptu Funeral

Chip chip chip...

Amidst the silence of the barren wasteland, the chisel hitting against stone felt like the only sound in the entire universe.

Bentley kneeled in the ashy ground, carving out a series of Enochian letters along the smooth surface of a large rock. A warm breeze caused her loose strands of hair to flutter around her face. Around her, there was little life to speak of, save the sparse greenery and occasional buzzing fly. This place, which had once contained a tall and majestic fig tree, was now beginning to resemble the realm of Purgatory. This place was now a monument to the dead.

Kneeling down beside each other, both Atticus and Ruth buried their wrists in the fresh dirt. Over the past few millennia, Ruth had snuck around to explore the Earth more times than Atticus could count. Sometimes she was discovered and punished for it, but most of the time she was sneaky enough to get away with it. As a result of her many personal field trips, she was more familiar with the scent and feeling of the Earth than Atticus was. So she guided his hands in digging a proper hole.

With every chip Bentley made into the hard rock, her thoughts fell deeper into the haze of her angelic years. Images flashed through her head: sunlight, fresh figs, a pair of golden cat eyes... But it had been so many years ago. All those instances and words passed between angels were now somewhere buried under the surface of memory, writhing and clawing, desperate to break free. Now after all the peace, war, wrath, joy, death, and rebirth, Bentley could no longer distinguish reality from old illusions of bygone days.

It had been thousands of years. Dozens of empires had already risen up and fallen. Billions of species had gone extinct or evolved into existence. Humanity's gods had blazed with glory and faded into nothingness. Bentley's first lifetime spent as Ruth pash de Michael was now ancient history in all regards.

Her movements were heavy and slow, but entirely deliberate. Despite her body's weakness left over from the fight in Purgatory, she was tireless in her task. And if she wanted to do things the easy way, she could have simply waved a hand and the set of Enochian characters would trace themselves out without a scrap of further effort on her part. But this was about doing the job, not getting the job done.

She had done the same thing when Lilith passed away. Back then, Xander had wailed and hissed at her, telling her that she was torturing herself by spending her time in such a way. However, as Bentley chiseled in the Latin letters of her deceased sister's name, she felt her heart settle after days and days of turmoil. What was excruciating for the impatient Xander became therapeutic for Bentley. Lilith's death had left both her siblings feeling helpless, so by physically manifesting her name on the rock, Bentley was able to do one last thing for her sister.

Now, it was happening again with Atticus.

There was no body for her to bury this time. All she had was a name and a flurry of indistinct memories from a time long forgotten, but that did not stop her from holding a memorial for him. In the traditional angelic burial rites, bodies of soldiers were supposed to be covered, accounted for, and burned without fanfare. Unless the angel was of remarkable status, or the circumstances of their demise were unusual or of great importance, there would be little mention of their name. For immortals, the willingness to die for a cause was truly noble —but actually being dead was an indication of your own failure to survive.

Bentley always said that the angelic-death-philosophy was bullshit. In her experience, funerals and memorials were not made for the purpose of honouring the deceased. They were made for the living to help heal wounds through the process of grief, and remind everyone why life was worth living in the first place.

Atticus pash de

The set of curly angelic characters was almost complete. Bentley's handwriting was peculiar and very stylized, so if anyone were to later lay eyes on the memorial, they would know exactly who had written it. She had already decided not to put any epitaph or words of memory on the stone the way she had done with Lilith. Bentley's own grave had been left blank, and honestly she liked it better that way. Atticus wasn't one for words, after all.