Lightbringer

Chapter 3: Fall

This is the part I'm most ashamed of. I want to tell you a different version than the truth, one that would make me feel better, but if I did, how would that make me different than the liars I decry? So here it is, my biggest regret and worst failure, the thing I don't want to admit and that might make you hate me more than ever.

I did nothing.

I should have done something. I should have fled to Earth, warned my humans Adam and Eve, and told them to run too. I should have stood tall and fought, denounced my father for his schemes, defended my friends and said something, anything, about what I thought was wrong. But I did nothing. And that was the lesson that taught me that doing something when something is wrong is so important, but it was a lesson that the humans paid and paid and paid for. The humans and all of my father's creation.

It was awful and unforgivable. Sometimes I don't know which is worse: what my father did, or how I did nothing about it.

So that's the truth. You can hate me now.

But that's not the end of the story.

My father gave each of the archangels (which apparently is some sort of rank or title) an army to command. There were four of us, the eldest, and we each had a legion of angels beneath us (God was busy). I felt a vast emptiness inside me after I had spoken with God. I went through the motions because I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't bear to go back to Earth; I wouldn't be able to look Adam or Eve in the eyes. Angels would ask what troubled me, and I couldn't put my horror and revulsion into words, but something got across. Gradually, I'd hear fragments of rumors zipping through their ranks, often hushed up. Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, the other archangels, started giving me pointed and downright dark looks. Finally, they cornered me and dragged me aside.

"You have to stop this!" Gabriel hisses at me. "You are sowing doubt and discontent among the troops, Lucifer, and it is entirely unfounded!"

"UNFOUNDED?!" I explode, then force my voice quieter. I no longer know these days how my father would treat me if I "displeased" him. Would he set me my own impossible test and doom me for eternity? "Wake up and smell the eidos! Don't you see what our father has become, what he is doing? How can you not be at least a little bothered by it?"

"He is our God and our Lord and we do not question him." Michael's tone is stern and unequivocating. "We are not his children but his servants, and it for us to obey and trust in his plan. Do not put yourself higher than you ought, Lucifer. Challenge God and be justly struck down. Obey him and you will be rewarded."

"Listen to them, Lucifer, please," Raphael steps in, interceding. "We are not your enemies. Find peace with yourself, with your place and your God. We would not see you destroy yourself."

I shrug off their appeasing words and touches. "If I am destroyed, it will not be by my hand nor by my fault," I say, and stalk off. There's so much pent up feeling in me, more than I have vocabulary to name. Frustration, outrage, despair, desperation, hurt, betrayal, loneliness, and more. More than I have names for.

I go to Earth. I need to warn the humans.

As I approach them where I had seen them from above (altogether too close to the trees for my comfort), I see an enormous serpent gliding away, congratulating itself softly. I catch it by the tail. If it was speaking, God was involved.

"What have you done?" I demand.

"Oww, let me goo," it whines, writhing. "I did nothing that I was not commanded to by our great and wise, all-knowing, all-powerful ruler of the universe, divine king of kings, yada yada. They weren't eating the fruit and His Divine Majesty was getting annoyed and impatient, so he told me to plant some doubt in their minds, give them a push, a nudge, move them along, what have you. So, I did. And they ate. I did quite well if you ask me. And this is how I'm rewarded? With indignity and rudeness? This uncalled for!"

I drop the serpent and run. I might be an angel, a child of a god, with divine powers in my own right, but not even I can turn back time. I burst out into view of the twin trees and the two humans, and I see a fruit, one from the tree of knowledge, hanging loose in their hands. They turn horrified eyes on me.

"What have we done?" Eve whispers.

I don't know what to tell them. Horror and grief and unforgivable anger at my father is crashing relentlessly over me, again and again, unabating. One voice inside me whispers to tell them to quick, eat from the other tree, and then they might have a fighting chance, a modicum of power with which to withstand God. The other voice advises that they should cut their losses, that half a failure of the test is more forgivable than full rebellion, that maybe, if they throw themselves before him and beg for his mercy, he might let it go. But I know better.

Before I can say anything, he is there. For the first time in forever, he steps foot on his Earth again, and he looms over the terrified humans roiling in fury and judgement.

You know this part of the story. You've heard how he cursed them to a living death, to a life of pain and misery before an eternal tormenting death. And he cursed all of his lovely, innocent world with it, the plants to lives of struggling, and mostly failing, for existence, the animals to lives of hunt and slaughter, the humans to lives of pain and death. It was awful. I witnessed it, and was powerless to stop it, either to change it or gainsay him. I don't even know if he noticed me standing there, frozen.

Just as suddenly as he came, he is gone. That curse, hearing what it contained and watching it handed down, the tears and despair of the humans, was the worst thing I'd ever experienced. Not one moment since has it gotten less awful.