A Broken Record On Repeat In A Crowded Bar

One Mistake Is All That It Can Take

They say the world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. The war ended with a squelch, as a housekeeper, singleminded and practical, thrust a dagger through the back of the first man to ever live and, just like that, Heaven became a dragon with its head neatly lopped off. Just like that, they won.

For the last few hours, adrenaline, fear and, more laterally, rage had been the puppet-strings holding Charlie aloft and, the second the portal closed they shut off and she was finally able to acknowledge the flimsiness of her joints, the quivering of her muscles. Exhaustion's swift-moving shadow stole her away from her body and, for a second, she could see the scene as a bird might, as a god might; seven little dolls grouped together in an ocean of red, gold, and rubble, a little bastion of helpless, hopeless humanity adrift in seas of suffering... a world she, with well-meaning hands, had created.

Distantly, she watched her body—golden haired like something sacred, gold splattered like something sacrilegious—stagger towards the King of Hell, six wings extending from his back, the broken shards of his halo a ghostly coronet. He looked magnificent. He looked every inch the angel he should have been.

He looked like a memory dredged from those bygone days when she had assumed him endlessly capable, a fragment of God given to her specially to keep the shadows away. In those fire-edged memories, eternally warm, he was untouchable; he never left her, never let her down. In some distant, hopeful recess of her heart, Charlie supposed she'd never truly abandoned that impression of him, those sunlit recollections, half-remembered, carefully folded and put away. They were being shaken out of their drawers now. It scarcely mattered that, these days, he had to raise his chin to meet her eyes; he opened his arms to her, and every muscle in her throat drew tight.

In the dying red light, Charlie collapsed into her father's arms, where he held her as he hadn't since she was a little girl, like nothing bad would ever happen to her again.

☽ 𖤐 ☾

Angel blood had a very distinctive smell to it, something acrid and sherberty like a lemon full of battery acid. The potent stink of it was enough to make Charlie lightheaded as she limped through the battleground which had been her beloved hotel mere hours ago, the grim, gold light of it searing scarlet whenever she closed her eyes. It was nothing like the dismally familiar reek of ruined demon flesh, though there was plenty of that too. Bodies lay everywhere, both those of the angels and her subjects—her people, who she had summoned to fight and die. Congealed red, black, and purple mixed with the gold and curdled it, steam rising from the pools in vast enough quantities that the air felt hot and humid as a summer's day, and the whole battleground wore a gauzy cloak of mystery, the dead tucked neatly into its folds.

She had only spent a few minutes pressed into the secure realm of her father's shoulder and already the war-torn hillside felt foreign to her, the ruined topography of some unfamiliar land she was but a visitor to; she waded through the aftermath of Heaven's wrath, wide eyed, ankle deep in mud and glass, searching...

They all knew what they were looking for—who they were looking for. None of them had spoken about it, but they knew.

Nothing moved in the wasteland. The wind, like the hot breath of some sighing creature, blew across the rubble, carrying the ghosts of the fallen back to her, a pet bringing her scraps of dead animal with innocent cruelty. Every sip of air she took was so densely saturated with the smell of death it was hard to want to breathe at all.

There was something so deeply surreal about the world at that moment, like it had all stopped working so she could walk through it unhindered, a shut-down fairground ride opening up its hidden heart for her inspection. It felt tight and dry like a nightmare. It tasted wet and briny as a fever sweat. From time to time, Charlie was seized by the mad certainty that, if she took a deep breath and held it for just long enough, the dream might pop like a bubble, and she would wake up in bed with Vaggie, in soft sheets that smelled of them, with everyone she loved alive and well in their own rooms just down the corridor.