Radicle (Terminal trilogy #2, can stand alone)

23: Back to war

 I did not think in months. But I knew they had passed. My hair was once again at a proper length and color. My mind no longer thought of Hell. I was starting to forget names, even- the only time they'd come back to me was when I made an effort to think of them.

It wouldn't be much longer now.

Dohn had been out in a war party for a while now. I had yet to find a hobby to fill the time with and, in between my farm chores, I mostly cleaned floors and dusted library shelves.

I was being eased frustrating slow back into military. I kept myself in shape by exercising daily, almost in excess. Sometimes Cassiel would join me on a run, and sometimes she'd lend me a blade and observe my technique. Raphael had healed my wounds the day I returned to Heaven, but it had been late coming and not a perfect fix- I still had the occasional jolt of pain and a constant soreness in my muscles.

And then there was the matter of my wing. No one knew about it, yet. But I kept on feeling like something terrible would happen if they did.

It was always a sort of temperate middle ground in Heaven, and this day was no different. I was practicing with a blade- in silence, of course- when Cassiel spoke up.

"You're rusty." She said. "Really. But you're up."

"Up." I said, not questioning but accepting. My name had finally been called for combat. "It's been long enough. I will die if I prove rusty enough."

"I'd really rather that you- or anyone else- didn't die."

"If I die," I said, walking over to hand back her blade, "It'll be because I was unfit for combat. So a deserved death then."

"Don't actually die out there, Nichael." Cassiel sighed, though I honestly didn't understand what was making her worry so much about me.

"I will try to make it heroic." I said. I was grinning.

I was placed in a squad- Tiphael, Manzul, Mnyeph and Galus- and sent on my way almost immediately. War was about moving and killing. Not waiting around.

There was no real leadership in the group. Naturally, I fell to the position of 'roughly the weakest' as indeed, I had been out of active duty for so long. But otherwise we made decisions by luck and short conversion.

There wasn't much to be said. The only thing that was given to us was which Earth we were heading to- in this case, the past. I realized, only now, that there had to be another portal that allowed for this between-times travel as we certainly weren't using the one in the basement of the orphanage. I had never really distinguished between the past and the present- cycles, while known, were a silly concept for angels to discuss.

How many portals were there? How did they even come to be? They were such odd things- rifts, really.

This portal wasn't even a hole in the ground like the others. It was just a gap. Deep in the woods, along a small stream and a trail that had long been well worn, there were two large boulders. Nothing else there, really. A couple misplaced bricks at most.

But then we marched between them, and the world changed in a way that was both incredibly obvious and oddly subtle. The transition was the slow part. Everything else was a sudden shock- the late autumn of Heaven turned to the summer of the Earth.

In theory, we knew where Hell was and the demons knew where Heaven was. But in practice, we'd normally just run off into the woods to have our fun. There were trailheads and cabins and old stone foundations to make into battlegrounds, and it had long been too traditional to throw away now.