Angel Tongue

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Pax, it seemed to Isaac, knew exactly where they were supposed to go.

Isaac had waited, stock still once he had put out the fire successfully, as Pax went over to his chambers to get his own things ready for the 'great escape'. His mind was foggy, stuck in a milk-like suspension as he sat alone in his room, a sensation that disappeared when Pax walked back, in, giving into the clarity that consisted of a voice in his head asking what he had done the entire time. And then, when he moved over to unlatch the large window, Pax ordered him to stop. This time, he did not use that mind-controlling ability of his (much to Isaac's relief), but the disbelief in his voice was enough to give him pause. He then insisted to use the hallways to get out, to which all Isaac gave as a response was a raised eyebrow. After a minute of persuasion (without the use of heaven-bestowed gifts, thankfully), he was able to convince Isaac with the promise of making sure nobody found out they were running away, lest they be caught.

Hence, they now found themselves on two stolen horses, bags slung around their bodies and heir hands gipping the reins so hard that they were red with blood rising to the surface of their skin. The wind whipped at Isaac's face, making it sting as he followed Pax through the trees that surrounded the Sanctuary.

"Are we not going to stop?" he all but screamed at Pax, whose horse was galloping several meters away from him. They had made it out of the Sanctuary without incident. Nobody was roaming the corridors, as though they had been compelled not to do so by some kind of higher power. This led him to suspect that getting his things ready was not all that Pax did when he left Isaac quite literally motionless in his room.

"What?" Pax shouted back, his head narrowly missing a low-hanging branch as he looked back at Isaac.

"When will we stop?" Isaac replied, simplifying his question. Slowly, he inched his horse forward, letting it accelerate so that the steed slightly overlapped Pax's making it so that they could speak more easily with each other.

"Stop?" Pax asked him, the tone of his voice rising at the last paragraph as if Isaac had just suggested that they simply jump off there horses and die to get to whichever hell dimension they needed to go.

Hell. They were actually going to hell. Isaac still could not find it within himself to let his head wrap around the idea. Hell had always been nothing more than just a place of fantasy and fiction of papered construction, a gilded cage made from the words of scripture, a warning to the wicked: leave your ways or suffer. But it was real, as real as the Behemoth, as real as the dead green man with the symbol burned onto his chest, as real as Isaac, who had relatively blended in all these years to discover that he was not normal, that he was not at all human.

"Do you have a better plan or did you imagine we will simply ride our horses to the ground?" Isaac could not help the hint of bitterness in his voice as he spoke. If Pax had not insisted on joining, if he had not so stubbornly forced himself into Isaac's sacrifice, Isaac would have long before set himself down and freed himself from the discomfort of riding at breakneck speeds.

And then what?

"I have a plan," Pax retorted, interrupting Isaac from his inner tactic creation. "Trust me." And then suddenly, as they reached the edge that divided the forest and the clearing that lay beyond it, he veered to the left, sending Isaac into a frenzy to try to convince the horse to follow the direction in which Pax had gone.

"This," came Isaac's response as he struggled to follow, "does not look like a plan."

Pax however, did not dignify Isaac's persistent doubt with a response, choosing instead to keep on going wherever he was headed. Which actually made an annoying kind of sense. He was, after all, more knowledgeable in the ways of heaven and hell than Isaac was. They were skirting the edge of the woods now, straddling the line of trees that spelled the boundary of the land that the protection of the Sanctuary had under its jurisdiction. The moon peeked through holes in the leaf canopy above them, sketching up spots of light that contrasted with the darkness all around. They were moving in the direction opposite of what they had gone through when they went to 'visit' his parents, Isaac realized, though they seemed to be moving in a slow arc as the forest's edge made a curved line that separated it neatly from the grassland that surrounded it.