Elara couldn't sleep.
Not that sleep was strictly necessary in Heaven—her celestial body seemed to run on some combination of Seraphic Power and divine will rather than mundane biological processes. But she'd always been someone who needed time to think, to process, to turn ideas over in her mind until she could see them from every possible angle. And right now, lying in her quarters as the eternal light of the Celestial City streamed through windows that never knew darkness, she had more to process than her mind could comfortably handle.
Start with what you know, she told herself, falling back on the analytical frameworks that had served her through years of activism and organizing. Separate confirmed facts from assumptions. Identify patterns. Look for the systemic structures underneath the individual events.
Fact one: Heaven was processing the spiritual essence of defeated enemies into weapons and equipment. She'd seen it with her own eyes, watched as what had once been a thinking, feeling person was reduced to raw material for the war effort. The clinical efficiency of it bothered her almost as much as the act itself—this wasn't passionate revenge or desperate survival, but bureaucratic soul-recycling on an industrial scale.
Which raises the question: how long has this been going on? Are all of Heaven's weapons made from processed souls? The armor I've been issued, the training weapons I've used—were they once people?
The thought made her skin crawl. She looked down at her hands, at the faint luminescence that marked her as a vessel for Seraphic Power, and wondered if she was wearing the recycled essence of someone who had once been as confused and questioning as she was now.
Fact two: Her fellow recruits weren't just accepting this system—they were actively celebrating it. People who had died as human rights activists, environmental protesters, social workers, and community organizers were now cheering as enemy souls were harvested for military resources. The transformation wasn't gradual; it was complete, absolute, terrifyingly effective.
But how? That was the question that kept circling back through her thoughts. People don't just abandon their core values overnight, even in extreme circumstances. There has to be a mechanism, a process that makes this level of ideological conversion possible.
She thought about the Seraphic Power flowing through her own body, about how it felt like pure moral certainty made manifest. Every time she channeled it, doubts became harder to maintain, questions felt less important, the rightness of Heaven's cause seemed more obvious. It wasn't just power—it was a form of psychological conditioning that operated at the neurological level.
They're not just training us to fight. They're chemically altering our capacity for independent thought.
The realization sent a chill through her that had nothing to do with temperature. Seraphic Power wasn't just a weapon—it was a drug. A spiritual narcotic that made moral complexity feel unnecessary and questioning feel like betrayal. And the more she used it, the stronger she became, the less likely she was to resist its influence.
Which means I'm running out of time. Every day I spend here, every training session I participate in, I become less myself and more... what? A celestial soldier who thinks soul-harvesting is a holy duty?
But that led to an even more disturbing question: if she could see what was happening to her, why couldn't the others? Were her analytical tendencies some kind of natural immunity to spiritual conditioning? Or was she simply experiencing a delayed reaction that would eventually bring her in line with everyone else?
Maybe the individual guidance sessions with Zadkiel are specifically designed to address that delay.
The thought made her stomach clench with something that might have been fear. Zadkiel's offer of "personal spiritual alignment" suddenly took on sinister implications. What if it wasn't guidance at all, but a more intensive form of the conditioning process? A way to break down whatever psychological defenses were allowing her to maintain her skepticism?
I need to think about this systematically. What are the components of the control system I'm seeing?
First: the physical environment. Heaven was designed to overwhelm the senses with beauty and perfection, making it emotionally difficult to criticize anything about the place. How do you rebel against paradise? How do you question a system that surrounds you with objective wonder?
Second: the social pressure. Everyone around her was convinced, enthusiastic, unified in their purpose. Humans were social creatures; isolation from the group was psychologically painful. Conforming felt natural, safe, correct.
Third: the power itself. Seraphic Power felt amazing—not just the rush of energy, but the sense of moral certainty that came with it. It was like being completely confident that you were right about everything, all the time. Who wouldn't want to feel that way?
Fourth: the framing of the conflict. Every aspect of the war was presented in absolute terms—good versus evil, order versus chaos, righteousness versus corruption. There was no room for nuance, no acknowledgment that complex problems might require complex solutions.
And fifth: the elimination of alternatives. Once you were dead, once you'd been assigned to an army, what choices did you really have? Defection was presumably impossible—where would you go? Resistance meant facing not just your immediate commanders but the entire hierarchical structure of divine authority.
It's a perfect system, she realized with grudging admiration. Multiple overlapping layers of control, each reinforcing the others. Physical beauty to overwhelm emotional resistance, social pressure to discourage individual thinking, chemical conditioning to make questioning feel wrong, ideological framing to eliminate moral complexity, and structural constraints to make escape seem impossible.
No wonder it works so well.
But recognizing the system's effectiveness only made her situation feel more hopeless. If she was right about the conditioning effects of Seraphic Power, then every day she delayed taking action was a day she became less capable of taking action at all. But what action could she take? She was one confused recruit among thousands of true believers, with no allies, no resources, and no clear understanding of what alternatives might even exist.
Unless...
The anonymous message flickered back through her memory: "Ask them about the Soulforge." Someone else knew what she was figuring out. Someone else was asking questions. Which meant she wasn't completely alone in her resistance to Heaven's indoctrination.
But who? And why haven't they made contact more directly?
The answer, she realized, was probably the same reason she hadn't voiced her doubts openly: it was too dangerous. If Heaven's authorities suspected that some recruits were maintaining their capacity for independent thought, those recruits would likely find themselves receiving much more intensive "spiritual guidance." Or worse.
So there's a resistance. Small, careful, probably very limited in what they can actually do. But they exist. And they're trying to warn people like me.
The question was: what did they want her to do with the warning? What good did it do to know about the Soulforge if she couldn't act on that knowledge?
Maybe the point isn't to act immediately. Maybe the point is just to know. To maintain awareness. To resist the conditioning long enough to be useful when the time comes.
But useful for what? What could a small group of secretly resistant souls accomplish against the entire celestial military hierarchy?
Start smaller, she told herself. What can I accomplish right now, today, without revealing my doubts or putting myself in obvious danger?
She could observe more carefully. She could start mapping the social dynamics among her fellow recruits, identifying who seemed most and least converted to Heaven's ideology. She could pay attention to the logistical aspects of their training—who went where, when, under what circumstances. She could begin to understand the actual structure of Heaven's military organization, not just the idealized version they presented to recruits.
And I can try to figure out how to maintain my capacity for independent thought without making it obvious that I'm doing so.
That might be the most important task of all. If Seraphic Power really was a form of spiritual conditioning, then she needed to find ways to minimize her exposure without arousing suspicion. She needed to be strategic about when and how she used her abilities, careful to maintain the appearance of growing devotion while actually preserving her psychological autonomy.
It's like being an undercover activist in an authoritarian regime, she realized. Except the regime claims to be paradise, and the stakes are literally eternal.
The irony wasn't lost on her. She'd spent her mortal life fighting against systems of oppression, and now she found herself using those same skills to resist what was supposedly the ultimate expression of divine justice. Either she was catastrophically wrong about the nature of good and evil, or the cosmic conflict she'd been conscripted into was far more complicated than anyone was willing to admit.
Or maybe, she thought as she finally settled into something resembling rest, the most important battles aren't between armies, but between the part of yourself that wants to think and the part that just wants to belong.
Outside her window, the perfect light of Heaven continued its eternal shine, beautiful and unwavering and utterly without shadow.
But inside her mind, in the spaces between thoughts where consciousness met will, darkness was learning to hide.