AZAZEL (DEMONOLOGY II)

XIX

FINN

I was home, but it wasn't the same. It was a fabrication. This wasn't the same home that I had spent seventeen years in. It wasn't the home that shaped me, the home that made me the person that I am today. It was just a weak imitation. I no longer had a home. That's when I knew that I had nothing left. My family and friends were either dead or estranged. If I could no longer seek refuge in them, and I had no home to run to in my times of need, then there was truly nothing to fight for.

But I forced myself to believe otherwise. That despite the fact that this world had ripped everything away from me, I was going to fight for it.

At least, that's what a hauntingly familiar voice told me in my dreams. When I woke up, my mother was holding me. And to be honest, I let her for a while. She had her wings out, and they cloaked both of us in a wall of white lush. It was the most comfortable I'd been in a long time. But this was the woman who had killed one of my best friends, the woman who allied herself with my crazy aunt. I couldn't just forgive her. Not until she gave me a truly heartfelt apology, and showed me why she deserved to call her my mother.

I pulled away from her, and she smiled warmly.

"You woke up a few minutes ago, and yet you didn't push me away. So why now?" She was clearly just teasing me.

"Doesn't matter. Has God responded yet?" I asked, eager to change the subject. When we had arrived in Heaven the night before, Wynne sounded an emergency trumpet that was to summon God.

"He will speak with us today." My mother answered. "But he will more than likely choose to remain neutral. His job is to oversee and create, and do nothing more." God, the person who supposedly had created the world. The person who I had plotted to kill just a few days prior. If he was truly who the Bible claimed he was, then he would know that. Would he punish me on the spot, or would he let my thoughts remain private? I was hoping - praying - that it was the latter. I no longer had the guts to raise a hand to him, not now, when he was our only hope at saving the world.

"Who - or what - exactly is God?" I asked. I was honestly curious.

"God is omniscient. He is not a man or a woman, but rather the perfect balance of both. Ancient people who never saw him assumed that he was a man, and it just stuck with everyone." She answered.

"So what does his body look like?"

"He prefers to stay in his purest form, which is just light. But he does possess the power to take on a physical form."

I thought about that as I walked around my house. I had fallen asleep on the couch with my mother, which was actually a good night of rest. The TV in the living room actually worked, despite the fact that there was no sort of power supply coming from the cloud that the house was on top of.

I turned on the TV and switched to the news. I instantly wished I hadn't.

"Lucy James reporting live on the scene in Jerusalem, where we are witnessing what many speculate to be the end of the world." The reporter whispered quietly into her microphone. She was crouched behind a large boulder. In the background, I could hear Azazel's cackling and the sound of the earth shaking in the background.

"There appear to be . . . monsters causing terror and destruction. There are two of them, and they call each other Azazel and Abaddon. Could we be witnessing creatures from Christian mythology running amok on the Earth? The military is trying to fight them but -" The reporter was cut off by a sudden burst of gunfire. The rock they were hiding behind shattered, and the camera cut off. I shut off the TV and walked out. I was able to stand on the clouds now - just another ability that I'd recently acquired. My mother followed me out and put her arms around me. I was too distressed to shove her away.