Heaven Divided

Michael came down through a storm of fire with twelve Paladins at his back.

They struck the eastern flank together, thirteen bodies falling from the red sky so quickly that the angels below had scarcely begun to turn before Michael hit the earth amongst them. The impact drove a hollow through the fighting. Mud, blood and broken weapons leapt waist-high around him; a soldier was thrown from his feet and disappeared beneath the press before he could spread his wings, while another lost his sword and reached instinctively for the knife at his hip.

Michael killed him before he found it.

The Twelve landed around their commander in a widening circle, and where they landed the battle changed.

They had been selected from every corner of the kingdom, some from houses whose names were older than Michael, others from families that had never produced a soldier before them. There was little about them that was uniform beyond their armour and the white sigil painted across their breastplates. One fought with a sword in either hand, another carried a spear taller than most angels, while the youngest of them used a curved blade Michael had mocked relentlessly when the boy first joined the Paladins and which Michael had since watched remove more heads than he cared to count.

They were not the largest warriors on the field. Lucifer had plenty of those. They were simply better.

The first twenty soldiers who reached them died so quickly that those following stumbled over the bodies. Michael drove through the opening.

He had fought for most of three days, though time had long since stopped meaning much. The sun had risen and fallen somewhere above the smoke, the western mountains changing from black silhouettes to bloody shadows and back again while the armies beneath them hacked one another apart over the same few miles of earth. They had begun upon green fields that rolled gently down towards the River Sael. Michael remembered grass reaching his knees when Gabriel formed the army there.

There was no grass now.

The earth had been trampled into a red mire across which the dead lay in numbers too large to comprehend. Wings made the bodies seem greater still. White, gold, grey, brown; some spread beautifully where their owners had fallen, others twisted beneath them or severed entirely by weapons and power. The field smelled of blood and wet feathers, hot metal and the strange metallic sweetness that followed the use of celestial fire.

No poets would sing of that smell. They would sing about banners and brothers, Michael supposed. They would find meaning where there had been very little and beauty where there had been none, if any poets survived.

A spearhead flashed towards him. Michael turned just enough to let it pass his throat, caught the shaft beneath one arm and saw the soldier holding it properly for the first time.

He knew her. Lirael.

They had once spent an entire winter at the northern palace because storms had closed the mountain passes. She had cheated him at cards for three months before finally admitting that she could see their reflections in the polished silver behind his chair.

For one absurd instant they simply stared at each other. Then somebody struck Michael from behind and the hesitation vanished. He twisted Lirael’s spear from her hands, drove the butt into the soldier behind him and heard something break. One of his Twelve moved between Michael and Lirael before either could decide what came next, striking her blade aside and forcing her backwards into Lucifer’s ranks.

Michael let her go. He hated himself for the relief.

The Paladins were moving north, exactly as he had ordered. Somewhere beyond the crush, two hundred of them were cutting their way towards the low ridge that commanded the centre of the field. Lucifer’s soldiers had held it since dawn, and while they held it Gabriel could not bring the western legions forward without exposing them to attack from above.

It was the sort of task for which the Paladins existed. Two hundred where another commander would have wanted ten thousand. Michael had never been certain whether that was something to take pride in.

A horn sounded twice from the west. Then once. He knew Gabriel’s signals as well as he knew his own heartbeat. Advance. Hold. Advance.

Michael almost swore. Gabriel had changed his mind. Again.

He lifted his sword and sent a pulse of light through it, not enough to kill but enough for the Paladins to see. White fire climbed the blade and rose thirty feet into the smoke. The formation altered immediately. No shouted orders travelled down the line. No messenger was needed. The northern elements stopped driving towards the ridge while the southern half folded inward, shields and wings closing around the wounded as neatly as though they were manoeuvring on a parade ground rather than through a battlefield.

That was why there were only two hundred. It had taken Michael four hundred years to make them this good. Lucifer had spent three years trying to kill them.

A figure dropped through the clouds ahead and struck the ground hard enough to send three Paladins sliding backwards. Uriel rose from the crater, his left wing burning.

Michael reached him as Uriel tore the remains of a spear from beneath his shoulder and flung it into the mud. He was one of the largest of their brothers, taller even than Gabriel, and ordinarily there was something stately about him that Michael had always found faintly ridiculous. There was nothing stately left now. Half his armour had gone, one side of his face was black with blood, and three feathers still smouldered along the edge of his wing.

Uriel caught Michael by the forearm and pulled him close enough that there could be no mistaking his words amongst the thunder of battle. He told Michael that the northern assault had failed, that Lucifer had committed another six legions from behind the ridge and that Raphael’s forces were being driven from the air above them. Gabriel was pulling the centre back before it became trapped, and Michael was to take every Paladin he had left and return immediately.

Michael listened without interrupting, though his eyes stayed upon the ridge. Something was wrong there. Lucifer had thrown too much at it.

He had been conserving soldiers since the second morning, surrendering ground whenever Gabriel pressed too hard and refusing every opportunity for the kind of glorious counterattack that had once made him famous. Yet now, with his southern line weakening and Gabriel’s army threatening to turn the field, Lucifer had sent thousands merely to hold a hill that would be worthless by nightfall.

Michael told Uriel as much. His brother wiped blood from his mouth with the heel of one hand and looked back towards the ridge. “Then tell Gabriel when you reach him. I’m carrying his order, Michael, not asking you to agree with it. Raphael has lost nearly a quarter of his host since noon and I’m about to lose what remains of mine if we stand here arguing over whether Lucifer has suddenly forgotten how to wage war.”

There had been a time when Michael would have smiled at that. He did not now. He called the Paladins back.

They withdrew in sections, one group fighting while another moved, wings opening and closing across the field until the whole formation flowed westward through the battle. Lucifer’s soldiers tried to follow. The Twelve discouraged them.

Michael remained at the rear. The eastern army was not made of monsters. That was what the priests already preaching about the war would never understand.

Men and women came for him beneath black and silver banners, faces Michael had seen at feasts, tournaments, funerals and weddings. Some screamed Lucifer’s name. Most did not. They fought because they believed their cause was just, because their brothers stood beside them, because surrender after three years of killing was more frightening than another hour of it.

One young warrior charged Michael with tears running openly down his face. Michael broke his sword and kicked him into the mud rather than kill him. Another took the boy’s place before he had even landed. There was no room for mercy after that.

By the time Michael reached Gabriel, blood had dried so thickly across his hands that his fingers stuck against the leather of his sword.

Gabriel stood upon a rise overlooking the western centre with the standards of Heaven snapping violently above him. Around the hill, messengers arrived and departed by the dozen while wounded commanders waited for orders and healers worked on those still important enough to be saved first. Their eldest brother stood in the middle of it.

Gabriel had lost his helm. A cut began above his right temple and disappeared into silver hair darkened by blood, while his armour had been split beneath one arm and bound temporarily with leather. Yet the field seemed somehow quieter around him. Men came frightened and left with purpose because Gabriel spoke as if victory remained a thing that could be measured and reached rather than prayed for.

Michael had envied that certainty when they were younger. He knew better now.

Gabriel saw him coming and dismissed the commanders nearest him before Michael had reached the crest. Michael didn’t bother with ceremony. He told his brother about the ridge, about the legions Lucifer had committed there and about the feeling that had followed him since Uriel brought the withdrawal order. Lucifer was defending something, or waiting for something, and whichever it was Michael wanted the Paladins back on the eastern flank before they lost the chance to discover it.

Gabriel heard him without interruption. That was another of his talents. Even when Gabriel had already decided you were wrong, he allowed you enough time to explain exactly how wrong you intended to be.

When Michael finished, Gabriel looked across the battlefield for a long while before answering. “I saw the reinforcements. Raphael saw them too. That is why I called you back. Lucifer has spent three years making us believe every strange movement conceals some piece of brilliance, and half the time he’s simply moving tired soldiers into a stronger position. I will not sacrifice the Paladins because you have developed an affection for his mysteries.”

Michael felt anger stir but buried it. “You didn’t see what happened when we approached the ridge. They weren’t trying to drive us back. They were trying to keep us away from it.”

Gabriel’s eyes moved to him then. That was enough. They had fought beside one another for too long for Michael to mistake the difference between dismissal and concern.

Before either could say more, the sky above the eastern army changed. The light went out, not everywhere, only above Lucifer.

Clouds had covered the sun for most of the day, thick with smoke and the dust of battle, but this darkness was different. It formed slowly over the ridge, spreading outwards in a great circular stain while the air beneath it shimmered with deep violet light. Every angel upon Gabriel’s hill stopped speaking. Michael felt the power from nearly two miles away, and ancient instinct raised the feathers along his wings.

Gabriel whispered their brother’s name.

Lucifer rose above the ridge. He did not fly. Flight required wings. Lucifer simply ascended.

Thousands of his soldiers stood beneath him, their faces turned upward while violet fire spread through the clouds overhead. From that distance Michael could not see his brother clearly, yet there could be no mistaking him. Lucifer had always possessed a brightness none of them shared. Their mother once said he had entered the world furious that the stars were already there.

Now the stars might have feared him.

Power gathered around his body in slow rings. One of the healers behind Michael began to pray. Gabriel ordered the western legions back, and this time no one questioned him.

Horns screamed across the plain. Standards turned. Tens of thousands began withdrawing towards the high ground while Raphael descended from the western sky with what remained of his aerial host. Uriel’s battered legions followed from the north.

Lucifer continued rising. Michael watched the energy gathering above him and understood why his brother had held the ridge. Not the purpose. Only the scale.

The earth beneath Michael’s boots had begun to tremble. A crack appeared across the stone beside Gabriel and travelled down the hill. Then another.

Far beyond Lucifer, beyond the battlefield entirely, stood the white mountains and the road that climbed through them towards the heart of their kingdom. Home lay beyond those mountains. Their cities, their people, their father’s halls. Everything left.

Michael looked at the shape forming in the sky and suddenly understood where Lucifer intended to send it. Gabriel understood a heartbeat later, and his eldest brother’s composure finally broke.

He began issuing orders so quickly the messengers struggled to follow them. Raphael was to bring every shield-bearer west. Uriel would take the northern hosts and evacuate the valley. The remaining reserves were to abandon the field completely and retreat through the mountain passes. Then Gabriel turned to Michael and told him to take the Paladins with the vanguard.

Michael stared at him.

Gabriel stepped closer, his voice almost lost beneath the growing roar above the battlefield, and repeated himself. Michael was to take the two hundred Paladins, form around the retreat and make certain nothing broke through to the passes. If Lucifer meant to destroy the kingdom in one blow, Gabriel would hold what he could here while Michael ensured their people survived whatever followed.

Michael knew his brother well enough to hear the part he had not said. Gabriel wasn’t leaving. Michael told him neither was he.

For a moment the supreme commander disappeared and Gabriel was simply his brother, furious and frightened. He gripped Michael behind the neck and pulled their foreheads together, speaking through clenched teeth. “You have spent your whole life believing courage means being the last man on the field. For once, listen to me. I do not need another glorious death. I need someone alive when this is finished. Take your Paladins and protect our family.”

Michael looked past him, towards Lucifer, towards the mountains, towards hundreds of thousands of soldiers trying to escape a field upon which they had already left too much of themselves. Something inside him became very still. He suddenly knew what he had to do, and that frightened him more than Lucifer’s power.

Michael embraced Gabriel. His brother stiffened, surprised. They had not embraced since before the war. Michael held him for a moment longer than he should have, memorising the weight of him, the smell of blood and ash, the hard edge of armour beneath his hands.

Then he stepped away. Gabriel saw his face and said, “No.”

Michael smiled faintly, not because anything was funny, but because Gabriel had always understood him too quickly. He handed his sword to his eldest brother and opened his wings.

Gabriel caught his wrist before he could leave. He was shouting now, but Michael heard only fragments beneath the gathering roar: orders, perhaps; threats; his name. Michael looked at him once, then tore free and flew east.

The Twelve followed. Of course they did.

Michael turned in the air and struck them with enough power to send all twelve tumbling backwards through the sky. He heard their fury through the bond they shared, felt them trying to right themselves and follow again, and severed the connection before they could. They would hate him for that. He hoped they lived long enough to do so.

Ahead, the eastern sky had become a wound. Lucifer hung beneath it. The armies below were fleeing now, both his own and Gabriel’s, because there are moments when allegiance becomes irrelevant and every living thing understands only survival.

Michael flew against them. Power streamed from him as he climbed. At first it came reluctantly, shaped by habits learned over millennia, measured and controlled in the way all celestial power was meant to be used. Michael broke those habits one by one.

He opened everything: the restraint Father had taught him as a child, the boundaries Gabriel had drilled into them as soldiers, the limits Michael himself had discovered over ten thousand years. He discarded them all.

Light gathered around him, gold at first, then white, then something beyond colour. Angels below covered their eyes as Michael crossed the field.

Lucifer saw him coming. Even from a distance Michael felt his brother’s surprise. The enormous power gathering above Lucifer faltered, and Michael hit him before it could recover.

The heavens vanished in light. For an instant neither brother had form. There was only power colliding with power, two forces born from the same source and shaped into opposite purposes. The shock travelled across the battlefield and flattened everything beneath them for a mile.

Michael regained himself first. His hands were around Lucifer’s arms. His brother stared at him from inches away while blood floated between them. Lucifer’s face was still beautiful. After everything, Michael thought bitterly, he was still beautiful.

“You should have gone with Gabriel.” Lucifer’s voice reached him strangely through the storm between them, deeper than sound, carried through the same ancient bond that had once allowed them to find one another anywhere in their father’s kingdom.

Michael held him tighter. Lucifer searched his face and understood. The anger disappeared. “What are you doing?”

Michael had imagined this moment differently during three years of war. If he ever stood this close to Lucifer at the end, he had thought there would be accusations enough to fill an age. He would demand reasons. Lucifer would finally confess the ambition Michael had always accused him of hiding. One brother would prove the other wrong and perhaps, in that certainty, make all the dead mean something.

Now none of it mattered. Michael looked down at the battlefield, at Gabriel, at Raphael and Uriel, at the surviving Paladins gathering around the Twelve, and at the distant mountains shielding everything he had ever called home. Then he looked back at his brother. “I am saving them.”

Lucifer’s face changed. “Michael, whatever you think you can do, you cannot contain this. The power is already beyond me.”

“I know.”

“Then let me finish it.”

“And kill them all?”

Lucifer’s jaw tightened. “If Gabriel’s armies survive today, this war continues until there is nothing left of us anyway. You know that. You have known it for years.”

Perhaps Michael had. That was what hurt.

Lucifer spoke on, no longer shouting, and for the first time in years Michael heard the brother beneath the king, beneath the rebel, beneath everything the war had made of him. He told Michael that their father had abandoned them long before swords were drawn; that Gabriel’s obedience had condemned thousands as surely as Lucifer’s rebellion; that the kingdom Michael was trying to save had already died and simply lacked the courage to admit it. There was bitterness in him, yes, and pride enough to drown worlds, but there was grief as well. Real grief.

Michael listened, then told Lucifer the only truth he had left. “Perhaps you were right.” Lucifer went utterly still, and Michael felt the surprise pass through him. “But I will not let you murder them to prove it.”

He released the last restraint. The universe opened.

There were boundaries between worlds that neither brother had ever crossed. Their father had forbidden it so long ago that the reason had become another piece of scripture recited without understanding. Michael found that boundary now and broke it.

Lucifer screamed, not from pain but from recognition, as space folded around them. The battlefield stretched impossibly beneath Michael, widening and narrowing at once. The sun became a streak of fire, mountains bent towards the horizon, and then came the pull.

Lucifer fought him with a strength Michael had never felt. Dark cosmic power erupted from his brother, clawing at the tear Michael had made while the great weapon above the battlefield collapsed into itself. The energy meant for the kingdom turned inward, drawn towards the breach. Lucifer struck Michael hard enough to crack bone, then struck him again, but Michael did not release him.

Then Lucifer stopped fighting. He stared beyond Michael, across the eastern army, where thousands of threads of dark light had appeared: the bindings Lucifer had made throughout the war, invisible until now, stretching from his body to the legions who had sworn themselves most completely to him.

Lucifer understood before Michael did. “No.”

The first angel rose from the ground, then another, and then hundreds. Thousands followed, all of them living, all of them screaming, their wings hammering desperately at the air while the force pulling Lucifer through the breach caught every soul bound too closely to his power. Michael tried to stop it and could not. Lucifer twisted in his arms with sudden animal desperation, no longer trying to save himself but reaching towards his soldiers, and Michael saw horror in his brother’s face. Perhaps Lucifer had never known this would happen. Perhaps he had. There was no time left to ask.

Heaven tore open, revealing darkness and impossible distance, and far below them hung a world neither brother had ever seen: blue oceans, brown continents and white cloud turning silently beneath the ruin of their war. Lucifer looked from the doomed legions to Michael, and for one final instant the armies, their father and the throne ceased to matter. There were only two brothers suspended at the boundary of creation, one holding on and one unable to break free.

Lucifer said Michael’s name, and there was so much inside it that Michael nearly faltered. He heard the brother who had once known him before command, before loyalty and before either of them understood that love could survive long enough to become grief. Michael closed his eyes, tightened his grip and took them both through the breach, away from their family, their kingdom and the only home they had ever known, while Heaven burned behind them and Earth rose to meet their fall.