Page 117 of The Simurgh

He drove his blade in, deep, deeper still, piercing right through, the tip thrusting through ribs and stabbing bloody hints of entrails into the air. Gabriel’s scream transcended his human form. The agony-spliced roar more akin to the bestial sounds of the Hellfield. The song of the dying.

Lucifer stamped his booted foot into the small of Gabriel’s back, and the angel’s paralysed wings slipped out to either side of him as he was forced to the ground. Pinned in place like a butterfly upon a board, he gurgled bloodied spit and vicious threats. Lucifer dragged his vestige free, and with one precise move, a blow he’d made a hundred times upon the battlefield, he cut off Gabriel’s wings at the root.

There was no sound like that of an angel who had lost their wings, the airborne made flightless.

‘A traitor to Arcadia no more,’ Lucifer said, beneath the unholy scream.

He moved to strike the final blow.

The simurgh’s shrill call deafened Lucifer to all else. He looked up, his instincts clamouring at him to move. To go. To help. Help. Help.

Despite Gabriel’s downfall, the divine cage surrounding the creature still held fast. But that was not the worst of it– the mirror, or the cage, he could not tell which, had moved. Azazel’s hands appeared as though they were but a few inches above the spire’s pointed tip. The simurgh battered its wings in the confined space, seeking to flee from the Exarch, but failing. Despite the strain forward of its long elegant neck, the flattening of its mauve-hued comb, the obvious pulse of wings to move away from the mirror, the creature’s colours seeped through the shining bars of its prison. Vanishing into the obsidian.

‘No!’ He leapt over the mess he’d made of Gabriel, wings crackling underfoot like autumn leaf fall, the angel’s groans pained. Lucifer lunged, raising the hilt of his vestige above his head, the sword point aimed towards the ground, and drove the tip through a gap in the bars and down through the base.

Pinning the structure to the paved stone of the conservatory floor.

‘Fuck,’ he cried, the roar of divine magick coming at him like a horde of Nephilim. The shattered skeleton of the Crystal Palace screeched overhead, its metal threatening to collapse entirely.

The force of the simurgh’s wing strokes fanned Lucifer’s face, oddly cool in the heat of the shattered conservatory. The cage bucked against the penetration of the vestige. Lucifer wrapped his arms around the hilt, using the quillons to brace as the divine magick sought to rip the simurgh’s prison away from him. The edges of the blade were hard against his armoured chest, cutting through his coat, biting at the shirt beneath. He scanned the cage, searching for an opening, some way to release the creature.

The radiant magick was gargantuan, and Azazel was its master, siphoning the simurgh inch by inch into the scrying stone. Lucifer knew nothing like it.

How did the angel wield such immense strength without a foot in this realm?

The simurgh slammed up against the roof of its prison, mad with its efforts to free itself. The broach spire caught Lucifer’s eye. Its tip was far brighter than all the rest, like a gem rested there. Light pulsed downwards in a notable rhythm, brightening every bar of the cage.

Lucifer pulsed with understanding.

Now he saw where Gabriel’s halo lay, shaping the cage, forming a decent part of its confines. Holding tight its hostage while Azazel worked at drawing the Cultivation through the obsidian. These angels defied the Exarch’s banishment with terrifying result. They had forged a link between the Faelands and Elyssiam.

Another violent jerk of the cage nearly broke Lucifer’s jaw, and his blade ground at his armour.

‘Gods curse it.’

Something weighty crashed to the ground nearby, one of the girders falling from overhead.

He’d made a terrible error in judgement, leaving Gabriel groaning on the edge of death and not tipping him over it. Killing the angel would not totally negate the power of his halo but it would certainly weaken it. Gabriel had no Blood Lake here to maintain its force.

With the halo’s strength failing, the Exarch’s foothold might be destroyed.

Lucifer would need to removed his vestige from where it anchored the cage to the conservatory floor. The simurgh would be unprotected.

Lucifer lowered his head, shaking it to dislodge the sweat running into his eyes. A clink of metal on metal drew his gaze downward. The Trumpeter dangled on its chain, somehow worked free of the layers of clothing and armour it had been hidden beneath.

It swung like a pendulum.

If the Celestials had written a message for him in the stars, it could not have been clearer.

He was a fool. Chasing a ghost.

Lucifer had stood by while the Morrigan and the angels tore the simurgh from Vassago. By not using the Trumpeter then and there, he had allowed the Primordial Flame to fall into Gabriel’s hands. A danger greater than the halo itself. He had placed worlds in peril, to assuage a grief that was his alone to endure.

Seraphiel was not the simurgh. The simurgh was not Seraphiel.

The angel was gone.

He leaned against the cage, managing the vestige one-handed. The angel-bone vibrated with the force of the divine magick working against it. This needed to be quick.