#0-99

She is a Goddess, sublime and terrible—a fitting end for a creature such as her, a fitting beginning for what she has become—and the eternal child, orphaned, stomps her feet and screams her tantrum.

This is no longer a game of equals, played with nails and deadly blows. When what called itself Hornet puts her silken claws around Lace, she cradles her like a treasure and gives her no more freedom than the last Mother.

Coryn wonders often if she will ever be herself.

She can’t escape who she is, she knows that; she’s rewritten her name, but the reflection of it remains; she’s made herself known enough to a few that the scar on her face reminds them of her before Nyra. She’s exhausted from having to build herself anew—She’s not her mother’s son, her father’s son, anyone’s son.—but one day, she’ll find herself whole and worthy, if she just keeps going.

Nyra plucks her downy breast bare for her new owlet, but these things require sacrifice. Eglantine is almost something Nyra can love, and if not, she doubts if soon, Eglantine will even be able to notice. Kludd will appreciate her more as a gift; a daughter is so much easier to mold than a sister.

Em’s body is still warm.

Sam doesn’t mean to touch her, but it isn’t real—her slack jaw and her destroyed eye socket—until her fingers slide into Emily’s limp grasp and feel her fading away. The cruelty lies in how peacefully the heat bleeds out of her, a betrayal of the shock of gunfire and the way she’d begged before turning into another body frozen on this mountain.

At this point, oh, it’s easy, and a human is nothing like the stars they share origin with, and Lucifer is beginning to realize that there is not, will never be fulfillment in this corrupted creation. And in this one, he pours that frustration and the desire he has to rend the squirming soul beneath his hand that he stays only to see what the outcome will be. As the loyalty he fed Lilith or the ambition he threw to Azazel, this one gluts on cruelty, and Lucifer casts aside its old name for a new one: Alastair.

Lucifer coils around Sam in endless loops of affectionate teeth, needling them on his soul until the sensitive hurts and self-loathing rise to the surface. Then gentle, lapping tongues to soothe the pain he's unearthed; he purrs, "I love you, I love you, even as you betray me, I love you," in a voice that travels across Sam's skin up to kiss him.

In the dark of the Cage, Sam shivers under the devil's praise.

The archangels were created in an instant, but to say that they were never children who played children’s games would be a falsehood.

Lucifer’s a good teacher as only an older brother can be, condescending and genuine in the same breath, and laughing, he and Gabriel spin illusions and cross blades that cannot harm the other without death’s intent already behind them until Lucifer eventually, always, wins and gloats.

What’s the garden for if not learning what roles they will play for the rest of eternity?