They had seen wars between the stars.
They had heard the music of creation as it first breathed light into the dark.
They had even stood beside the Throne in the earliest days, when their names had been sung by mortal lips as prayers, not curses.
But nothing in all those eons had prepared the three former Archangels for what they had felt in these last moments.
Memories crashed over them like an unending tide, each wave carrying its own weight, grief sharp as glass, longing that ached in the bones, resentment burning low, and awe that left the air thin in their lungs. The emotions tangled together until they could barely stand beneath them, every thought and breath pulled into the undertow. In another time, it might almost have seemed absurd, but there was nothing humorous here, only the solemn, unshakable presence of something greater, a sacred terror threading itself through every heartbeat.
The only one untouched was Simon.
He remained still, distant, like a man watching a storm from a high place, knowing it could never reach him. While the others drowned in their recollections, Simon's expression never shifted, his eyes were calm, almost indifferent, and yet that stillness carried a gravity that made even the angels uneasy.
Raphael was the first to stir. His voice, still laced with the solemn authority of prophecy, finished its slow cadence. Each word seemed to echo in the hollow places their hearts had forgotten existed. The sound of it was both a benediction and a warning, the kind of truth that could sanctify, or damn.
And as the last syllable fell into silence, the others seemed to awaken from the corridors of their own minds.
But there was something else, subtle, easily missed by mortal eyes but painfully visible to the ones who had once walked the courts of Heaven. Raphael's back, normally straight with the unyielding posture of an Archangel, had been bowed. Bowed, not by age, but by something deeper. Yet, as each memory passed through him, he seemed to straighten, not in health, but in pride. Every flicker of pain in his brothers seemed to feed something in him.
The greatest shift came when they spoke of Uriel.
There, the mask almost slipped. His lips curved, not in joy, but in that faint, mocking smile that always meant danger. The kind of smile that asked without speaking: What if I am using you? What if I am always using you? What if I am, was and will forever be, your superior, what is it you think you can do?
Whether he truly was superior was another matter entirely. In Raphael's own mind, the answer was not in question. It had never been.
Even now, fallen, stripped, changed, he regarded himself as above these brothers of his. In his mind, the hierarchy had not been erased, only disguised.
And in truth, he had been playing a dangerous, intricate game. The karmic threads binding Luca and Michael to Uriel had been more than bonds of brotherhood. They had been conduits, veins carrying the deep, pure faith that Uriel had gathered during her centuries in the mortal realms. Faith that Raphael had siphoned without their knowledge.
He had woven that stolen faith into a quiet assault upon the seals that bound his Grace. Every heartbeat, every whisper of belief that once belonged to Uriel now became a chisel against the divine lock upon his soul.
When the seal loosened, the faintest trace of Grace would leak. With that, he would strengthen the connection to Uriel once more. With the connection stronger, more faith would be drawn. With more faith, the seals would weaken further. A cycle, seamless and unending, that would, if left unchecked, eventually shatter the prison around his true self.
It was an elegant cruelty.
But Michael had seen through it.
Or perhaps "seen" was not the right word. It was more primal than insight, his eyes had burned with a dangerous, unnatural blue, the light of wrath without hesitation. And as the second cycle of siphoning began, Michael severed it. Not cautiously, not even with precision, but with sheer, unrelenting force.
The thread to Uriel snapped.
The thread to Loki through Gabriel crumbled in its wake.
They could not begin to comprehend the true weight of what Raphael had done. The faith well of an angel was not some mere reservoir of power, it was the heart of their being, the place where their bond to the Eternal was most pure and inviolate. Even to graze the edges of one's own well was beyond reach, a mystery locked away from both the lowliest seraph and the highest Archangel. Such depths were not meant for mortal or immortal hands alike.
But to reach into the sacred well of another… that was not only impossible, it was sacrilege of the highest order. It was the tearing open of the holiest ground, a trespass so staggering that no tongue could speak it without trembling. The thought alone was enough to still the air, to make the silence heavy with unspoken fear.
And Raphael had done it to one who was not even in the same plane of existence. The mortal worlds were already distant from the Heavens, separated by veils no mortal language could describe. But the Ninth Heaven, it hidden even from most of the Host, was buried under layers of power and secrecy that had endured since before the Fall.
Yet Raphael, in a soul-scarred, Grace-less state, had bridged it.
Granted, Uriel was compromised.
But anyone who knew her would tell you, there were no safe moments to take advantage of Uriel. A wounded lioness was still a lioness.
Michael did not care for the miracle. He cared only for the threat. And with no warning, two Pangas appeared in his hands, one glowing with the searing heat of judgment, the other breathing the frozen breath of eternal winter.
The air plummeted into a frigid silence, though the cold here could not touch flesh. It reached deeper, it was the cold of creation's first night, the silence before the first Fiat Lux.
Raphael felt it in his soul. His hair rose. His Grace, or what remained of it, quivered like a candle before an oncoming wind. He had miscalculated.
He had thought none of them would dare. Not with Simon present.
Especially not Michael, who had long seemed to wait for orders like a soldier before a king.
But Michael moved without looking to Simon.
Simon, still unmoving beneath the tree, made no gesture to stop him. His calm became something else, an indifference edged with the faintest amusement, as if to say, Go on. Show me what you are willing to do.
The cold blade moved—not in a blur, but in a slow, almost ceremonial motion, pointing toward Raphael's heart.
It was Gabriel who moved to intercept.
He caught the blade with his bare hand. Grace flared across his skin in a desperate barrier, but the frost bit through it as though the divine light were no more than candle wax. Ice bloomed up his arm, the weight of it pulling at his very soul.
And worse, he could feel his Grace being drawn out, stolen into the hungry steel.
If he held it longer, there would be nothing left of him to hold.
Raphael's voice, when it came, was sharp, cutting across the moment like a trumpet in the halls of judgment.
"There he is," Raphael spat. "The butcher himself. How many of our brothers and sisters have fallen to those cursed blades? You may be the perfect brother to Uriel, but do you imagine we all share her sentiment? To most, you are nothing more than an overpowered psychopath. You do not frighten me, Michael. Put them away before you disgrace us all."
He spat this words with a resentment of eons past then turned toward Simon, like a man appealing to the one presence he thought might still hold sway.
But Simon's gaze did not rest on Raphael.
It drifted toward Luca.
And Luca, in turn, began to nod, perhaps to end this before it became blood.
But Michael's voice cut through them all.
"I will go."
His eyes met Luca's steady, unblinking. And then his form began to dissolve from beneath the tree, fading into the unseen paths between realms.
His voice lingered behind him like a curse.
"This time, I will kill. If I catch a scent of that vermin you call a friend anywhere in that world, I will kill without mercy. I have never been kind. You should know that, Gabriel."
clearly he did not care all that much about Raphael's words about how others perceived him, 'a perfect little solder indeed' Raphael mused inwardly.
The echo of his words did not fade quickly. It seemed to cling to the air, thick as incense, heavy as ash.