all relationships have an inevitable end. it starts in the way paint peels from the edges, with your nails scrapping at it in an attempt to smooth the surface once more. the crack just keeps going until your nails are worn, flaked red residue trapped beneath — endless hours spent under tap trying to wash all traces. lucifer examines them under concrete coloured light bulbs. still stained.
to love someone when you have no more secrets has romantic merit, but when Truth has raised an army and is battering at your doors, the heart stops. it is a mechanism of self preservation, because a heart is frail, beating a hummingbird rhythm down a winding path. you can't love an instrument of the apocalypse if you can read the scripture lining their insides. that is not a secret. that is a fact.
the horsemen are God’s tools, the archangels are His enforcers.
war's fatal flaw is not pride, but lucifer thinks that she is already magnificent in her wrath: igniting, burning, her hair covered in ash, the way her insides open spilling ruby eyeballs along the flames — she's here and nowhere — sunken eye sockets empty. her eyes need to be everywhere on this battlefield, and her true eldritch nature obliges her wishes. she can see.
war appreciates the honesty of his approach, lucifer peels back her skin with no preamble and watches war spill onto the floor, he pays close attention to the bones, to the skin. he squints as he reads for hours on end with an unspooled horsemen at his feet. his fingers press down on those tiny carved rust letters as war's existence becomes a dimming heartbeat.
in her opinion, archangels and horsemen have never really been friends; having the eldritch core of her being exposed like this means nothing.
the hinges are rusted, the doors open with the sound of grinding teeth. the army-like rows of mouldy, cracked benches, the carpet is the colour of damp earth, the frayed strings like maggots wriggling beneath her boots. this place was holy because people believed it so, without them there are only echoes of their hope behind. unanswered prayers written in the walls.
lucifer watches war stitch herself back together: skin, ligaments, muscles; slotting, and twisting and cracking. her ribs are lined with feathers, her innards blink sleepily at the archangel as they entwine with the small mouths that line the stomach. a galaxy or two for each horseman, supernovas that feed God's tools.
lucifer with galaxies for pupils. he never promised the horsemen anything because they were tools - there was nothing they wanted for themselves, their purpose carved in scripture along the inner lining of their physical forms (archangels on the other hand have watched humanity enough to learn want). her hands cupping lucifer's cheeks as the world burns: she's breathlessly desperate to finish her task. gabriel's preference for war makes no sense to him.
— Horsemen & Archangels [ starshaping ] || Eliot C.
