I returned from the bath with fresh skin and a renewed sense of camaraderie, which I assumed meant Michael's plan had gone through. He still didn't let me leave, but that would be next.
I slept on the floor, as I usually did, and had another round of regrettable and forgettable nightmares before daybreak. I was sitting upright before any of the Brothers arose, and after a long couple of impatient moments, I knocked on Michael's door.
"Permission to leave?"
"No." Was his groggy answer.
"Please, sir, I am restless."
"You never used to call me sir. What's up with that?"
"I want to fight the demons. I haven't for so long. Let me out on the battleground."
"Absolutely not. I do not know if you're pure yet."
"I have always been pure. Please. Test me."
"I don't do tests." He said, muffled by the door, but I could almost hear him plot. By the end of the day, he'd finally know I was the most loyal angel he had. No need for doubt from either of us.
He let me walk outside, almost freely, by the time the sun was up. But he was following me. It was wholly unusual of him to be out anywhere, and highly distracting for the angels who were trying to get their work done. Especially for the angels of the outer ring- he barely visited them, and now he was following me through their lands.
No one dared to speak to me with Michael at my heel, so I had to walk up to some of my old friends. Naon, Zedrael, Camoth- still alive, well. Kiel, Parabel, Tul, Barth, Aedeniel, Biala- dead. I made note to think of them in my night's prayers.
"Who are you closest to? Dohniel? Or one of them?"
I watched his eyes anticipate my answer. "My closest friends are either dead or felled."
"That must have bumped someone up to fill the gap, yeah?"
"Naon then."
"Naon? Hm. Naon? You have any other close friends?"
In all my delight of being with Michael, I still hadn't managed to completely null my mind from all critical thinking. And Michael probably knew that- it had been him who had invited Dohn, after all. He knew Naon wasn't my closest friend- he was an apprentice of the electrician Henzil. Too valuable to get involved with anything.
"Fielm, then." I barely knew Fielm.
"He's dead."
"Oh. Uh, Lakoi?"
"Lakoi? Alright. Nice to know."
I had a feeling Lakoi wasn't going to be... well, I wasn't sure yet. But it wasn't a good feeling to have, especially for an angel.
"Have you reconsidered letting me fight?" I said.
"No." He seemed to admit it truthfully, like he honestly hadn't put it into thought since I had mentioned the idea in the morning. "Look, Nichael, I realize you want to get out there. But you've only just returned from Hell, yeah? You're not ready. You told me yourself: you've heard things that have swayed your mind. I worry the battlefields will slow your healing."
"I'm..." I didn't really know what to say to him, mostly because I was suddenly acutely aware of how casual I was being towards him. And how casual he was towards me. Then again, Michael seemed to treat everyone with the same level of disconnected respect. It was probably good he didn't speak to too many of his angels, or else they'd grow worried.
"I'll see how you're doing later. I have a quick errand to run. Fraternize while you have the time."
He scurried off and I turned back to face the fields. They weren't much for fields, really. Heaven was pretty big, surprisingly big, actually, for such an ill-managed town. But there were still far too many eye-sores.
The fields were small and confused. I had been a farmer before the draft turned me to war, but I hadn't really been aware of how poor we had been working the land until I worked in Hell's farm.
We were inefficient. We didn't really know how to harvest seeds or clone or propagate or anything. We were just sort of weeding dirt and hoping something grew. There was probably a book on gardening in the library, actually.
I didn't actually like reading, or books, or fossils, which is all the library contained. But as I watched a farmer overwater his small patch of herbs, I decided I might as well go. Michael would be back for me pretty soon anyways.
The library was a library, and it stood in the same spot the library was in the past Earth. The books had changed though. We did have our own literature, technically, and certainly our own language. There wasn't enough time for many angels to write anything, though, so most of the shelves were just filled with carefully selected non-angelic works.
I saw Percial sitting on the third floor reading a fiction book with a questionable cover. I guess I was still feeling casual enough to sit next to him.
"No." He said the moment I approached his table. I quickly diverted my path towards a nearby shelf and began browsing.
Here were all the angelic books we had, which were almost all non-fiction accounts of the war, life, and several poetry collections. Among them were sacred art books, ones I realized had likely been draw by Michael himself. They made reference to our mythology and customs through sketches and short blurbs.
Michael was our leader, and our everything. His Brothers were like our minor deities, and Percial was... a more minor deity. The women were all on Michael's level of holiness, though on a strange scale of being both greater and less than him.
But we had one other figure of worship: A goddess. Sort of. She wasn't really a goddess in that we believed her to be an entity in the sky, more powerful than the world itself. She was a goddess in that she wasn't tangibly real and probably had a couple magical powers. In this way, she was treated as being just another of the women, if only a never-around one.
We didn't have a name for her. Just 'The Goddess' would do. Technically, her name (and thus, the word for goddess) meant Lily. She represented life and death equally, and where ever she walked, a lily would grow and then die in a few seconds. She was said to walk the Earth among us, invisible, and when she spoke she would heal your wounds- physical and mental.
I don't think anyone really believed in her in the same way they believed in the Brothers or the women. She just wasn't as real. There was still part of me that kept her in my prayers, and her face was permanently etched into my mind from constant exposure, but the goddess Lily was honestly nothing more than an example of why Michael and his brothers deserved my attention. They were real. They were actual.
Michael seemed to like drawing Lily a lot, though. I didn't really know what the implications of that were. She always had impossibly long hair, a model most of the angelic women were required to stick to, and a full figure. Her eyes were impossibly dark, so much so that they were often depicted a being pure black. Her skin was dark too and usually depicted as being covered in flurries of paler spots. She was usually drawn naked, but even when she wore clothes, they were drawn black. The only thing of color or brightness on her were the white lilies in her hair and wake.
We had statues of Lily, drawings of her, paintings, etchings on our armor- it was hard to go through the day without her judgmental gaze staring you down. But I hadn't really paid much attention to her at the same time.
Overexposure, I guess. I almost felt like I was looking at the sketches of her for the first time, which is probably why they were starting to look familiar. Doubly familiar, that is, as I had probably seen them before in my time in Heaven.
It was just that Lily was starting to remind me, ever so creepily, of Moll Manly. I couldn't be sure quite what- after all, they looked quite different. Moll had a much stockier and less curvy body shape, with short curly hair and lighter skin and eyes. But there was something about that face- and those freckles- that was just familiar.
There was no doubt that there was absolutely no connection between the two. It wouldn't make a lick of sense- Moll was a demon, and Lily was a concept of a woman that Michael enjoyed drawing. But they had the same sort of face, and the same sort of gaze, and I guess I had finally figured why I was so interested in Moll. She was weird. Like a living version of a fake ideal.
Was this why I was so drawn to her? Some sort of hidden sense in my subconscious, burrowed into my mind after many, many years with the same woman watching me? It did not make sense. But I suppose repetition can drive a hard dent on a mind, even if you aren't listening.
There was a sense of situational irony, I suppose, when the Church Tower sounded its bell and I was still looking at the goddess. She was the carrier of death, and now she had brought it- it was time for a funeral.