NOCTURNE

WHEN: Memoriam of the First Twilight WHO: closed for @columbadei

They say the worst form of loss is the one that continues to live. Death is supposed to give finality, though Arael would argue she didn’t receive that with Uriel, but the living forms of loss will continue to plague someone. That sense of unrest came to Arael as she watched Azazel from her position in the crowd. The hints of betrayal dance below her features as a variety of memories flick through her mind of the pair.

The first came in a visage of white. Arael had tucked herself at the edge of Heaven’s reach in the hopes that one day she’d be able to unshackle herself from its grasp and be back among the stars. That fatal dose of melancholy weighed her down as she stared off into the abyss before she was greeted by an angel that also felt pulled to the edge. No smiles were exchanged that day, but a quiet understanding formed between the pair.

The second came in a cloud of smoke. Arael wandering back to that corner week after week in a quiet hope that her companion, her first friend, would be waiting there for her. It had been strange to feel a spark of life surge through her, but it had nestled into her heart like the beloved angel that laid beside it. The two would wander the edge, hover between Heaven and the unknown, before quietly disappearing back to the others.

The last came in a host of flames. Arael was no stranger to anger. she had first felt the feeling when she realized what she had become and what was stripped away from her in the process. She had even grown to find comfort in that feeling. To feel that anger blanketing her as she learned that Azazel had abandoned her for Hell still travels with her as she looks upon the demon’s present day form.

Arael didn’t know when she had wound up next to the demon, but she felt herself drawn to their form as the two once-companions stood next to each other. Anger and hurt were glimpsed behind her familiar icy visage as she allowed herself to examine the demon’s wings— or the ghostly frame that now occupied the space. Her voice was quiet but form as she shattered the silence.

“Azazel.” 

This Memoriam of the First Twilight is a sequence of offerings—just as the sacrificial animal is rent apart, so too does it give unto others. That is the nature of death: it is a cycle. Light rolls between the temple’s pillars, moving as a snake does when it tosses about on its belly; it passes nervously between the gaps of Azazel’s fingers, deathly afraid of being unpeeled by her shadows. Azazel unloads a bank of crystallis into a bowing hand. Walk in harmony, she commands. As she turns, one is reminded of the pink lips of Eve, reaching up to greet the serpent’s mouth.

Before she can spin on her heel to meet the gaze of her next visitant, she is greeted instead by something far too familiar for comfort: that look of contempt, a scorned carriage of indifference. Cold and brittle anger, pumping like blood beneath the flesh.

“Arael,” she says, dulcet-smooth, with the look of a woman who is not disturbed by the harsh memory placed before her. Arael, she says, with intoxication on her tongue, the sting of sulphur lingering just beneath it.

They had been friends once; but that was many aeons ago. Stealing away from God’s righteous angels, fleeing from the Creator’s custodians of self-worship, running bare foot in the heavenly lands in search of pestilence and decay—those days are gone. As if children, they had their legs off the edge of their shared cloud, bartering there with confessions, stealing secrets from the other’s ribs. Azazel wonders what secrets Arael has buried within herself now. She wonders what she might have been had she fastened herself to Heaven, to her beloved Arael, her ankles bound there like metal chains.

She might have sat on that cloud with Arael for all eternity.

Persephone bites into the fruit, its juices spilling down her chin. She becomes. And then, like a chill that slides down your spine, she recoils.

“Time has not changed you, I see.” Is that not the nature of time for such creatures? Time, that everlasting cloud that hangs heavily overhead, waits silently, sits still. The immortal is everlasting: what is time, pray, for indelible marks; for things that do not fade? 

date: late in the first week of the new moon location: tridium temples, azazel’s private quarters closed for @columbadei

A man was dead. Not simply a man, a leader, and a beloved one at that, Judas needed remind himself — and he needed remind himself often, for what ever could a mortal with a garden-variety heart and no tooth or nail ever be but a simple man? It didn’t matter; being greater would’ve made him no less dead. In his deadness, Judas reasoned, Cador now had all the time of an immortal — a gift, some would argue; thus, he’d surely feel no ill will towards Judas for spending his first first moments in the Holy Land not paying respects to the departed, or consoling those who’d held Cador dearest, but paying due tribute to his moon.

Great black feathered wings folded tired on his shoulders, he approaches the doors to Azazel’s private chambers. While the majority of his things remained in tow with the outstanding caravans, but few objects of value had made the journey at Judas’s hip to ensure safekeeping. Amongst them, he holds a circlet — platinum, encrusted in ancient opal and diamond, a relic said to have been plucked from the brow of a slain angel who’d cried as they fell for a God who could hear no more prayers. It weighs comfortably in his pocket, nested safe in a velvet-cushioned wooden box, primed to be presented to Hell’s crown princess herself. In sixty years of diplomacy with the Holy Land, he’d never been fool enough to arrive at Azazel’s temple without tribute. He’d be twice the fool if he allowed the proceedings of a humdrum mortal’s funeral to stop him from doing so this time.

She’d have been his first stop either way, gift in hand.. peculiar circumstances, or not. Years in the art of diplomacy brought many invaluable lessons; amongst them, a cornerstone — the people cannot be trusted with the whole truth. It falls to the skilled lips of the politician to reveal and omit, to shape a truth the people can embrace. That, it seemed, Azazel had learned well. The story she and Gabriel told of the Stars’ fall was folded crisply at its edges, trimmed in ivory lace, topped with the curl of a ribbon — a politician’s expertly-woven tapestry. This was not all there was to know. The air in the temples hung just a breath too heavy on his shoulders for this to be the truth of all truths. Behind private walls, surely, she’d throw the fantasy to the wind and brief him as if he, too, governed alongside the Sun and Moon. That was why she was there. He needn’t remind her.

He knocks twice, and announces himself with a loud, deliberate calling of “Azazel,” before he inches the door forwards and lets himself in, as if the authority instilled in him by his kingdom simply transcends jurisdiction — as if he can come and go inside the Tridium’s temples with the very same authority as the ruler he visits. (Ruler. It’s an endearing honorific on Azazel, and it fits just about as well as a child playing pretend, insisting on being addressed as Doctor as they don their dress-up gloves. It makes her smile, though, and keeps her loyal, so who does it harm to play a little pretend?) He greets her with a warm gaze and a wide embrace, body still in aches from the journey, but a practiced smile of wonder and awe ready for her all the same. As he pulls away, one hand settles on her slender shoulder and with a light turn, he meets her eyes. “Azazel,” he repeats, and this time, he sees her. “How I’ve missed you. By whose divine hand do you grow more beautiful each time we part?” A hand dips from his side into his pocket, pulling the dark wooden box from his cloak and presenting it to her. “For you,” he nods, with an upwards tug of his lips. “I can imagine its beauty on no one but Infernum’s pride.”

A veil of black silk, spun like the diaphanous web of a spider, still falls demurely over her eyes, and Fenrir, her monstrous companion, rests his white jaw at her knee. She runs her fingers distantly through his fur, her attention curiously captured not by the sharpened teeth of a beast breathing at her side, but by the display now arranging itself at the foot of the Temple. Azazel leans forward in her chaise to get a closer look. Upon tighter examination, she learns it is nothing out of the ordinary: a drove of mortals lamenting the loss of the Stars; Cador, who had faded abruptly, and quite inexplicably, from the black blanket of the sky. Nevertheless, she watches on perplexed as they begin to arrange themselves around the keystone, bowing their heads in supplication as if worshipping beneath ancient altars. Azazel smiles wryly as they begin to invoke Cador’s name, spoken with the faith of a man who believes in the holy powers of enchantments and blessings, cupping the candlelight in their hopelessly temporary hands. They turn themselves into sculptors, carving out mournful elegies with their scalpel-like tongues, and they do so with such ferocity that Azazel wonders for a moment if Cador might peer down from the next world to lend his ear and listen.

They wash over his fleshless, departed soul with love of the earth.

How strange.

She is not a creature that has ever been forced to acquaint herself with the feeling of having something taken from her—true enough, circumstance had willed it so more than a hundred centuries ago. No. Her decadence is a tomb, and she has always been perfectly content to lay herself to rest there.

She watches the pallbearers with distant curiosity, yet feels no desire to know their loss. How fortunate, then, that she has something to distract her.

Cador was dead, by somebody else’s hand. That was an important distinction; one that separated the esteemed Sun and Moon from the scores of civilians, already taking to the streets to grieve. It was a secret they had mutually agreed to hide away, tucked away into the shadows like a loose thread at the end of a sleeve. Buried beneath the shadows.

But do not things grow in the dark? Hadn’t she?

As if roused by that thought alone, she is stirred by a gentle rap at the door. Then, a word. A name. Azazel. She knows well who hides behind the door long before he swings it open; she thinks she understands why he has come. Azazel uncrosses her legs and rises from her chaise, careful not to disturb Fenrir’s half-slumber, before making her way towards him, her movements the very image of sumptuous polish. “Judas,” she mimics, entirely unsurprised by his familiarity, the word like velvet in her mouth. She softens at the sight of him, as a child does when it sees its mother, and then by some frightening twist of nature she smiles wickedly, her eyes darkening in such a way that they never do in the company of any beast but the Great Betrayer. “By whose divine hand? Why, my own. But of course, who else is more divine?” She offers Judas a swordplay of her own. “Are you so intimately involved with your own schemes that you cannot sniff out the ploys of others? I must make artifices of my own, no?”

She settles herself back on the chaise, patting gently at the space beside her, inviting Judas to sit beside Fenrir. She continues: “I must, else you might leave me here, alone. You might forget me, leave me to become unimportant; unloved. I wouldn’t like that.” She chooses to play the role of a neglected child, spoiled by her pampering, ruined by her indulgence. It is not a role she plays particularly convincingly. Who could forget Azazel; the Dove of God, the Cherub of Hell, Judas’s own arcane shadow? There is so much of her in him, and so much of him in her—neither one of them can look in a mirror without being reminded of the other. “No, I am only being foolish. You could never forget me.” It is a statement that refuses to beg for assurance. There are no illusions.

With the exception of the scent of burnt flesh, it is a night like any other. Hand after hand has reached out to embrace her, fingers creeping wantingly over her shoulders and, like a pebble made smooth by the vicious nursing of the sea, she has been scoured raw, eaten to the bone, made perfectly round. In the festival’s backwash, it is easy enough for her to forget Gabriel’s words of warning; it is easy enough for their secret, already hidden, to slip from view. The thought that there may well be a killer amongst this sea of celebrants comfortably eludes her; as does the notion that the butcher might touch her with one hand, and wield a knife in the other.

The angels bat their feather wings at her, and she soon forgets Cador; the demons leer darkly up at her, and she ceases to think of the lie she and Gabriel have left in the shadows. The mortals weave their fingers between hers like molten gold fit to a cast, and they whisper their worship. They had been God’s favourites, once, and now they are hers, splayed at her feet like beggars praying at the foot of an altar. 

For tonight, however, she is tired of their wheedling and honeyed words. As the sun begins to stir, she seeks something less contrived; less coy. She seeks Jasper Riche, and she finds him standing sullen, sandwiched between celebration and carousal.

She seeks out the one who denies her, who takes great pleasure in belittling her—who seems to despise her but whose eyes she always feels, following her. He means nothing to her either, but that is not the point: there is nothing particularly special about Jasper, nothing that seduces her, but he pays her no mind, and Azazel can only answer this cruel aberration by paying him every moment of hers. It is her desire to be admired by all, even the impervious, who regard all good cheer with dark scorn, that compels her to approach him now.