Can Immortals Have Souls?

Part 1 - Discovery

Shemhazai the Fallen looked down from his palace window and smiled at the children as they played and splashed in the pools dotting the palace gardens below him. It was a warm and cloudless day, the summer sun low on the horizon. Their song-like laughter drifted easily up to the balcony platform where he and his guest reclined.

"My children," Shem said, glancing at his guest lying on the plump couch opposite his before looking back down at the rascals as they played, "are the reason I wake in the morning. Nothing I have done comes even remotely close to the joy I feel when I am around them."

All of them were his: children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and beyond all playing together without ever wondering why their lives were so different to the humanity outside the palace walls. Outside, they called him Lord Shem and saw him as an immortal god. Inside, he was just Poppa, or Grand-Poppa, or Father. Outside, they did not question the power Shem had at his disposal; one did not question the gods. The villagers and the outlying farming families only knew that one of the gods had chosen to live among them, and protected them. Inside the walls, Shem taught his children the truth of the world and showed them how to harness the power they had inherited from his blood.

Banadriel shook his head and laughed, the action making his jowls quiver. He glowed with the same pale radiance as Shem, as if a candle burned in the centre of their bodies. It left a faint luminescence encircling them, a lingering consequence of their celestial origins. "Surely there are better distractions," he said, cocking his head to one side. "As soon as I discover one of my women is with child, I kill them. I've done the same thing for millennia. It's safer that way."

The look on Shem's face at those words went unnoticed by his fellow Fallen Angel, who was motioning impatiently toward a house-slave for more food. She quickly brought Banadriel the large platter of fruits in her arms, her soft leather-soled sandals making a whispering patter on the marble floor as she moved. Dark skinned and fair haired, she was known to Shem by her slave name of Bella. As the fat Fallen leaned back and opened his mouth, she dropped in three curving slices of ensete in quick succession. Bits of the soft yellow fruit slid out of the side of Banadriel's mouth as he chewed noisily. He closed his eyes as he savoured the taste, unaware of the mess running down his bulging neck to stain his white robe.

Banadriel ruled Kadero across the Red Sea, a burgeoning city of humans to the west of Shematel, Shem's home and seat of power. Shematel Palace, nestled between the fork at the base of the Twin Rivers, was a sprawling structure with an octagonal shaped outer wall divided by a tower at each corner. A larger tower dominated the centre of the palace grounds, from the balconies of which Shem watched his children. Arches, pillars and obelisks dotted the inner yards and gardens at regular intervals, the ornate stonework taught to the stonemasons by Shem a thousand years earlier. The children's laughter drifted up through the balcony windows and Shem let his guest drone on while he glanced down at them again.

Although Banadriel grated on Shem's nerves, he was one of the few Two Hundred who Shem could abide for any length of time. To say their views differed on the subject of humanity however would be an understatement.

"So you are never interested in the child's fate?" Shem asked, his eyebrow arching in query. "In our... life before this one, we were never allowed the right of creation. At the best of times, we simply... existed."

"But they are mortals, Shem." Banadriel frowned, genuinely confused. "It is not creation when the thing made breaks down and dies in the blink of an eye. They're lucky if they last seventy years."

"You know that's not the case for those we sire," Shem said, looking out the window beside him once more at the children below. At least ten of them were in the middle of an energetic game of find-the-fox. "Some of them have lived for centuries. Some of them have been great men among their people."