Lucifer took hold of himself, breathed a few deep breaths, and looked around.
Like Roger Daltrey, he could see for miles and miles. All around him, his co-conspirators littered the dungeon, which flamed with fires that shone visible darkness instead of light, which was for the best. Everywhere around him was suck and hopeless suck and torturous, ever-burning, sulfurous suck, and it was easier to ignore in the visible darkness.
It had been a hard couple of weeks—a devastating battle; a grim defeat; a long, embarrassing fall through all of creation into the depths of fiery Nothingness. He stretched as well as he could beneath the chains and shook his head.
Wait a minute, thought the chief rebel in a rage of self-loathing and exposition, there are only two types of beings in the universe: angels and God. God made everything in the universe, because He can’t delegate for shit. This is a prison, which He therefore made, and since God’s not in it, it’s a prison for angels. But, he seethed as the thought hit him, no angel has ever broken a rule before, so why would it exist?
The idea crashed into the wall of his pain-fogged brain. God knew we were going to rebel. That Fucker shared a milkshake with me just the other day, and He already knew he was going to banish me here!
Lucifer shivered. He didn’t feel only anger (though he was quite angry), or sadness, or betrayal. His entire being seemed empty. His skin felt dead. Something was missing. Maybe it was the sensation of not being on fire—but there was something else. Something important…
And then with true dismay, Lucifer realized what it was. He realized what hurt most of all; he immediately recognized the futility of everything he had done thus far. For the first time in his life, he was without the presence of God. And in this moment, and maybe for the rest of eternity, he couldn’t think of anything worse than that.
He cursed his weakness and looked around him again, at his companions in the darkling flames, twisted and miserable, o’rewhelm’d with floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire, and he wondered if they felt it too.
There beside him, impaled asswards on a stake of sizzling sulphur, was Beelzebub, his second-in-command. Lucifer tried to speak, but his awe at the all-enveloping silence squelched his voice. He cleared his throat, marvelled at the echo in the infinite caverns of Hell, and spoke:
“Beelzebub! You look like garbage.”
“Yes!” said Beelzebub.
“What do you mean, ‘Yes!’”
“I just mean, ‘Yes! That’s very accurate!’”
“Oh, thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Morning Star.”
“Please, don’t call me that.”
“But you like it when I call you Morning Star. It’s our thing.”
“I don’t feel like a Morning Star right now. I feel like a failure.”
“Yes, Morning Star! That’s because you failed!”
Lucifer roared. “Don’t call me that! And why are you so excited about everything? We’re in a pit of fire, surrounded by the twisted wreckage of our crushed compatriots. You have a flaming sulphur stalactite up your ass, for God’s sake. Try to be a bit more, well, downcast.”
“Stalagmite, you mean,” said Beelzebub.
“What?”
“Stalagmites rise up from the floor; stalactites hang from the ceiling. They hang ‘tite,’ that’s how you remember it.”
“I couldn’t possibly care less if it was a stalactite or a stalagmite!”
“That’s because it’s not stuck up your ass. Accuracy dulls the pain, Morning Star.”
Lucifer bore his teeth and roared again, making sure his anger came across this time, “Don’t call me Morning Star!”
Beelzebub recoiled. “What should I call you, then?”
“SATAN!” he howled, surprising himself. The sound reverberated through the caverns with a sinisterness he found delightful.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” replied Satan, “it just sounds hardcore.”
“Satan!” It did, in fact, sound hardcore. “I can live with that!” said Beelzebub, “Now, was there something you wanted to say?”
“Ah, yes,” said Satan, “We have been cast out of Heaven into an eternity of torture.”
“Eternity? No, I don’t think so. If we just repent…”
Satan’s face turned bright red. “Repent?!”
“I’m sure if we just said we’re sorry, He’d…”
Satan smashed Beelzebub in the nose with a fist, sending him flying across the fiery lake. “Even if He did hundreds of times worse to us, I will never repent! God hurt my pride, so I took up arms against Him, and then He hurt my pride again, and now I’m feeling even more…”
“‘Belligerent’, Satan?” He had made his way back, rubbing his aching, but now empty behind.
“I prefer ‘Bellicose’—It sounds nobler. All is not lost!”
“Well, pretty much all is…”
“Our will remains inviolate. We still have vengefulness, immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Shall we bow to Him now?”
“Well, that does seem like the obvious next step.”
“Never! Don’t you see how much we’ve learned from this little defeat? We’ll be ready for Him next time! And through force or guile, we’ll wage eternal war without mercy against the Heavenly Tyrant until the end of time.”
A tear fell from Beelzebub’s eye. He suddenly felt the pain behind Satan’s words. He sidled up beside the big lug and threw an arm around his shoulder. Just as he did, Satan began to weep like he had never wept before. His hulking body shook with gargantuan sobs.
“There, there, Morning Star,” Beelzebub said, rocking him gently. “Let it out.” He held him for a few moments until the sobs died down, and spoke again. “You really assembled a grand army.”
Satan nodded.
“Now I believe that God is almighty, because if He wasn’t, He wouldn’t have had a chance in Heaven against us. You made Him prove it. You should be proud of yourself. You know, a second before He demolished our forces and cast us out of Heaven, I could swear I saw Him shaking in His sandals.”
“You did?” Satan sniffled.
“You better believe it, Morning Star.”
“You mean Satan?” Satan blew his nose in his sleeve.
“Of course I do. Satan. And even though He may have kicked us out of Heaven, we’re heavenly essences. Our minds and spirits are invincible, and our strength and vigor are coming back. Just look around you!”
Satan looked around. Several of his minions had stood up and were helping their compatriots to their feet. He managed a toothy grin. “You’re right! It’s not so bad!”
Beelzebub beamed.
Just as quickly, his smile faded. “Oh, but, if our minds and spirits are invincible, what’s stopping God from torturing us forever or using us as slaves to do his errands in the gloomy deep? If we never die or weaken, he can force us into eternal labor!” Beelzebub wept.
Satan patted him halfheartedly on the back. “Fallen cherub, buddy, weakness is misery, and we have the strength of angels. He’ll tell us to do good, and we’ll do evil. We’ll do the opposite of everything God says! If He tries to make something beneficial out of our evil, we’ll make perversions of His noble intentions.”
Through his tears, Beelzebub saw Satan peering upward toward heaven, the lightless flames nonreflecting off his unglassy eyes.
“Look! The choir of angels that chased us down here are gone! The thunder has stopped! The sulphur storm has blown over!” Satan looked around him. “Over there! Do you see that dreary plain, forlorn and wild, the seat of desolation, void of light save what the glimmering of these livid flames casts pale and dreadful? Let’s all go over there and have a Revival!”
“A Revival?” Beelzebub asked.
“A Revival!” Satan confirmed, grinning.
Satan, quite proud of himself, stretched out on the liquid flame, beefy in his beefy manliness, beefier than the Titans that warred against Zeus, beefy Briareos, beefier Typhon, or the beefiest of all God’s creations that swim the Ocean stream, Leviathan, who, when spotted by the pilot of some small, night-founder’d skiff, might be mistaken for some beefy, beefy island, so the Arch-Fiend was similarly beefy, lying there looking manly on that lake of fire. He felt pretty proud of himself, knowing that the chains couldn’t hold him and that he had essentially beaten God (except that he hadn’t), but he would have his Revival, and weren’t nobody gonna stop him.
Satan sat his beefy ass up and shook off the fiery chains like they were Chinese finger-cuffs, with considerable difficulty. He roared, and the flames retreated from him, leaving a horrid valley where he stood triumphing. He spread out his formerly white and effulgent wings, now stained black with the ashes of Hell, and soared effortlessly into the dusky motherfucking Hell-sky like a boulder tossed out of an erupting volcano. He landed like a cannonball on the smoldering ground, followed by his sinister lieutenant, where they both flexed like mean-ass tigers, looking like the victorious gods they felt like.
“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,” said then the lost arch-angel, “that we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom for that celestial light? God is the king, after all, and He can so decree. And I say, ‘Fuck Him.’”
Beelzebub cheered.
“This is the best imaginable place!” quoth the Infernal Sovereign.
Beelzebub agreed halfheartedly.
“Hear me out,” he continued, “We’re every bit as smart as God, but He’s a little bit stronger, so He gets to be in charge. Here, we’re as far away as possible from Him, so we don’t have to follow His orders, which would be obnoxious to have to do, because we’re not dumb enough to need to take orders.”
Beelzebub had discovered an itch in his knee pit and was no longer paying attention.
“It doesn’t really matter where you are, it’s your attitude that matters!”
Beelzebub nodded absently, feeling much better now his itch had been thoroughly scratched.
“Here at least we shall be free. God put us in this shithole; He’s certainly not going to kick us out! Here, we can build a safe, independent, sovereign nation with me as emperor! It’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven!”
Beelzebub snapped out of it. “Wait, with you as emperor?”
“Obviously, yes.”
“So, when you say it’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, you mean...you.”
“Well, yes, of course. You’ll be serving in Hell. Which is objectively a little less good than serving in Heaven.” Satan’s matter-of-fact good sense was hard to argue with.
“Well, that’s kind of a bum deal.”
“Yes, certainly! But you gave up serving in Heaven when you followed me into battle, didn’t you? You loyal bonehead you.”
Beelzebub’s shoulders seemed a bit less high and square. “And when you said, ‘We’re every bit as smart as God…’”
Satan smiled a princely smile. “The royal ‘we’, of course. But I need subjects! They’re all still sitting in the fiery lake rather than attending my Revival.”
Beelzebub knew Satan was right. He had made his bed. Righteous indignation wasn’t going to help him now. Maybe he could get together an army and mutiny! No, that suddenly seemed like a terrible idea. He steeled himself to his fate. He embraced his status as favored lieutenant.
“They have not yet joined us, because you have not yet roused them with your inspiring voice. They only need a pep talk to get them moving,” he offered, fearing that his opinion wasn’t valued, but deciding to share it anyway, out of habit.
“You’re absolutely right!” Satan said. Beelzebub brightened and forgot his misgivings as Satan strutted toward the shore.
Satan picked up his shield where it had fallen at his feet. It was huge and circular, forged in the fires of heaven, and it hung on his shoulders like the moon didn’t. Had Galileo seen it through his telescope, he would have imagined rivers and mountains on its surface.
Next, he lifted his spear, taller than the tallest pines, and used it to support his uneasy steps over the burning marl, which was tough on his tender tootsies.
“Nice spear!” Beelzebub said.
“Isn’t it good?” Satan asked, rhetorically. “Norwegian wood.”
Fully armed, the King of the Underworld arrived at the smoky beach and called on his legions, who lay on the surface of the boiling pond like Egyptian soldiers in the Red Sea or fall leaves in the Vallombrosa. His encouraging voice resounded throughout the caverns of Hell:
“You lazy sons of dogs! Nine days ago, you were princes, potentates, warriors; you were the flower of heaven—the best of the best! You had beds made of rose petals and clouds which you shared with the most beautiful pieces of angel ass heaven had to offer. Now you’re floating on a literal lake of fire, just lying there like you don’t know the difference! Or is this the deal you made? Are you to remain in prostrate obeisance to your conquerer? Pathetic! What if God’s avenging angels see you like this? Do you think they’re going to take pity on you? Do you think they’re going to be frightened? No, they’re going to bully you like fat kids for the rest of eternity! Shake it off, you worms. Get up! Stand up like the fallen angels you are!”
They jumped up in one surprised and embarrassed mass, flapping their wings and rising languidly into the air like front desk attendants awakened from their slumber by paying customers banging on the counter of a Motel 6, going through the motions of a friendly check-in though half asleep. At first they didn’t notice their pain, but obeyed their general immediately, taking to the sky en masse, like when Moses called a plague of locusts that darkened the sun, but different, because there’s no sun in Hell. The idea, though, is that there was a fuckload of them; like a lot a lot.
Satan waved his great, girthy, veiny, turgid, engorged Norwegian spear in the air to direct them, and they charged down into the plain. If the plains of brimstone were Rome, they were the Northern barbarians, and they descended on those plains like the barbarians descended on Rome, but much more literally, because, you know, they were actually flying and therefore literally descending. They hurried into formation behind the several leaders of every squadron, who stood in front of their great commander, each of them Godlike in form, though not in provenance, and looking really quite sexy, and even though they were used to sitting on golden thrones in heaven, they managed to slouch in the flames with a certain confident nonchalance.
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And what shall we call these magnificent beings? In Heaven they keep a list of all the angels, each of whom has a glisteny name, like Adonai or Gamaliel, but if you take part in a revolt in Heaven, they cross off your names from the Books of Life with angel sharpies so that they can never be read again. Therefore, we don’t actually know what these angels were called.
Later on, however, they would go wandering over the Earth, and with the power of lies, convince the majority of mankind to forsake the true God and worship them instead. That’s why, in a lot of places, instead of worshipping the Invisible Glory of God, people worship weird, brutish, golden beasties who good Christians like you and I are instantly able to recognize as devils. Well, when people worshipped them, they gave them names to make them more personable or something, so we’ll just call them by those names.
So, starting with those who were ballsy enough to continue to have cults near where the early Jews were encamped, who durst abide Jehovah thundring out of Sion, and who even managed to occasionally be worshipped within the jurisdiction of the Temple, let’s name off some of this infernal rogues gallery, shall we?
First, there was Moloch.
I know I said these guys were attractive, but we’re going to fast forward a little and see what they look like after they’ve been operating for a while. It’s kind of like a Dorian Gray vs. The Picture thing, where, you know, it’s the same guy, and you want to make out with version 1 and version 2 makes you paint the ceiling with vomit. Which these guys would be totally into, so you know, everyone’s happy.
Now, as promised, Moloch, horrid king besmear’d with blood of human sacrifice and parents’ tears, whose children were thrown into the fire that burned beside his idol, their cries drowned out by the noise of drums and tambourines and electric guitars. The Ammonites worshipped him in the area that is now Jordan. He defrauded Solomon the wise (though gullible) into building a temple to him right next to the Temple of God. The valley of Hinnom, which was apparently quite lovely, had to change its name to Gehenna because that seemed more Metal, and therefore appropriate for a place where there were a lot of human sacrifices.
Next, there was Chemos of the Moabites, to whom Solomon also built a temple. He was also called Peor, specifically when he was tricking the Israelites into getting frisky with the daughters of Moab. From there, he made an orgy garden on the Mount of Olives, right next to Moloch’s valley, so if you were getting bent over a chest-of-drawers you could look out the window and see people getting tossed into the flames, or not, depending on what you’re into. According to later accounts, Josiah, good guy (and party pooper), drove them both thence back into Hell like a Meatloaf album.
Along with them came that sweet troop of demons, who were worshipped from the Euphrates to the river Besor (which separated Egypt and Syria back in the day). They were called Baalim when they were male and Ashtaroth when they were female. You see, spirits can assume either sex, or both, or whatever, because their essence is pure and bodiless—doubly so their genitals. They can take on whatever shape they like, because they don’t have bones or flesh or anything, and can be little or big or bright or obscure, or whatever they need to be to execute their aerie purposes, and works of love or enmity fulfill. These little fuckers lured the Israelites away from their God and into poor decisions in battle and love, leading them to beheadings and venereal disease, though not necessarily in that order.
At their fore came Astarte, or Astoreth, the Phoenician Moon Goddess, with her crescent horns, to whom Phoenician virgins used to sing not-terribly-ribald songs. Solomon built a temple to her, too, by the way, when his many, many wives pulled him away from the path of righteousness to worship their idols, thereby ruining polygamy for the rest of us.
Next came Thammuz, whose unhealing wound caused the river Adonis to run purple in the summer (Eww.). His love story was so touching that hearing about it caused Sion’s daughters to mourn his death right in the porch of the Temple, which is looked down upon. They thought they were being sneaky about it, but God brought a vision to Ezekiel, who saw everything and told them to go home and pray or executed them or something. Now, I can see why you might say it seems a little unfair to be angry at these ladies just for mourning some dude. But the mourning of Thammuz involves lots of weird lesbian sex games and some ill shit that is apparently not okay in a Temple of Jehovah. Ezekiel was bent because he was a rule-follower and God didn’t really leave him unsinful means to take care of the raging boner he got from his vision. I can see both sides, really.
Following them was one who would eventually be very bitter with God, having lost an idolatrous thumb-wrestling competition when the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant and thoughtlessly put it in his temple. The Ark broke off the head and hands of the image in the night and made all of his followers feel silly and also grow painful tumors. You can call him Dagon the Sea Monster, who is man above the waist and fish below it. He had a temple in Azotus, and was dreaded through the coast of Palestine, in Gath, Ascalon, Accaron, and Gaza. You’ve heard of him because H.P. Lovecraft was his agent during his comeback and got Stuart Gordon to make a movie about him.
Rimmon of Damascus came next. He had a really quite lovely temple on the bright banks of Abbana and Pharphar, but he was also a dick to God. Though one of his leprous worshippers abandoned him when his leprosy was cured by bathing in the river Jordan—point God—Rimmon also talked King Ahaz into tearing down God’s altar and replacing it with one of his own, where Ahaz sacrificed his children and adored the false gods—point Rimmon. God punished him by naming the act of licking another’s butthole after him.
Next came Osiris, Isis, Orus, and their entire pantheon, who dazzled Egypt with their sorceries and animal heads. They were defeated by Jehovah, or so the story goes. In reality, Jehovah had nothing to do with it. They were just edged off the face of the earth by Bast, their cat.
Finally, came Belial, than whom a Spirit more lewd fell not from heaven. He truly loved vice for the sake of vice. He never had any temples or altars, but when Priests turn away from God, it is he who greets them, with mylar balloons and reasonably well-designed dot-matrix home-printed banners (with the spooling guides carefully removed). Such was the case with Eli’s sons, who filled the house of God with lust and violence, defiling animal sacrifices (through carelessness) and defiling the girls who were dedicated to the tabernacle (through their panties). This Belial also reigns in courts and palaces and luxurious cities, which he fills with riot, injury, and outrage, and when the sun goes down, his sons, the violent drunks, wander the streets and back alleys of the world. Belial led the mob in Sodom, and the one in Gibeah where the Levite sacrificed his concubine to save his own ass, both literally and figuratively.
There were a bunch more, but these were the important ones. I’ll give you some broad categories.
In one clump, the Ionian gods, first identified as gods by Ion, son of Javan. Later authors said they were the children of Heaven and Earth, which seems shaky since we know God made them, defeated them, and cast them out of Providence. The first of them, Titan, had a bunch of large kids, known uncreatively as the Titans; their youngest brother, Saturn, castrated their father, felt up his sister Rhea, and gave birth to Jove or Zeus, or whatever. Their worship started in Crete and Ida, and they ruled the middle air, their highest heaven, from the top of chilly Mt. Olympus. Or maybe Delphi, or Dodona. Or whatever. Any way you look at it, they were losers. Saturn, Zeus’s father, retired to the British Isles, where he keeps a cozy flat in Guildford.
So, long story long, all these downcast angels came flocking onto the plain, though if you looked closely you might see an occasional twinkle in an occasional eye when they recognized their chief and saw how very smug he looked in the off-kilter, makeshift revival tent he had set up. With high words that sounded really, really good, though they didn’t really mean much, he spoke to them, thereby raising their faded courage and dispelling their fears.
“This is a revival,” roared the Dark Lord, “And you can’t have a revival without some pomp. Ring some bells! Play some trumpets! And more importantly, raise my flag!”
Azazel the Scapegoat, Lucifer’s standard bearer, had been waiting for this pretty much all damn day. It’s what he does. It’s what he lives for. And tall, beautiful Cherub that he is, nobody raises a flag like Azazel, who forthwith from the glittering staff unfurld th’imperial ensign, which shone like a meteor across, well not the heavens, but the uppermost bits of Hell, emblazoned with Seraphic arms and trophies embroidered in gold thread and inlaid with rich gems. Trumpets, bugles, trombones, French horns, tubas, flugelhorns, cornets, Sousaphones, and the occasional piccolo blew a cacophony of disparate and discordant notes, and hearing this, the host of demons sent up such a magnificent shout that it tore Hell’s Concave and frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night. Ten thousand banners rose into the air, in blood reds and fiery yellows, and every color known to angels and man, and with them, a forest of spears, a field of helmets, and a Domino Rally of serried shields, thick arrayed as far as the eye could see.
The jarring notes of martial brass (and the occasional woodwind) were replaced with flutes and fifes playing a simple, solemn Dorian melody, and as it tripped and trilled, the army came alive and marched in perfect phalanx to the music. Rage became deliberate valor, firm and unmoved, and the disordered horde became a perfect, disciplined army, stepping, breathing in unison to the soft pipes that charmed their painful steps over the burnt soil. And thus they stood, awaiting the command of their mighty chief.
But does he speak? No!
Satan’s practiced general’s eye overlooks them all as he struts up and down the ranks, inspecting the entire battalion. They, with the faces and stature of gods, were his army, and before he had counted the last of them, his heart moistened, melted, unfroze, dewrinkled, and swelled to twice its previous size before drying out and freezing again until it was every bit as cold and dead as before, but twice as big! Which was objectively still pretty small, but, you know, a substantial improvement. Never in the histories of the wars of man was there met such a show of raw power. In fact, against these, even the greatest of mankind’s armies, nay, even the seven armies at Thebes combined with the Greeks at Troy, The Knights of the Round Table and all their suppliants, and all the Christians and Paynims who fought with and against Charlemagne at Fontarabbia would be nothing more than a small troupe of pygmies pecked to death by migrating cranes.
Despite their strength, or maybe even because of it, the armies stood in awe of their dread commander, who now stood like a tower of hot beef at the fore of their rank. He had not yet lost any of his original brightness, though he seemed somehow obscured by loss of Glory, like when the sun first comes up on a smoggy day and still looks like the sun, but a smoggy, less-shiny version of the sun, and you’re like, “I don’t think I’m supposed to look at that because blindness, but it’s not really uncomfortable to look at it, so maybe it’ll be alright just this one time,” and then you have purple blotches all in front of you all day long, or like when behind the moon in dim eclipse the obscured sun sheds disastrous twilight on half the nations, and with fear of disaster perplexes monarchs. The Arch Angel was so much darkened, but still shined above the rest. His formerly perfect face was entrenched with deep scars of thunder, and his cheek was heavy with worry, but his handsome brow was set with pride, courage, and revenge. His eye was cruel, but tempered with remorse and passion looking on his fallen fellows, who had followed him into eternal pain and condemnation. Millions stood before him, all deprived of Heaven’s healing grace and eternal splendors for his own fault, yet they stood faithful, proud in their diminished glory, like a forest of tall oaks or mountain pines, their stately tops bare from lightning strikes, rising like conquerors above the blasted heath.
Only now did Satan prepare to speak. As he did, his troops moved closer, circling wing to wing around him, mute with attention. He tried three times to speak, and three times tears burst forth in place of words, and then, softly and strained and interwoven with sighs, his words found their way.
“Hey guys. You all did really good up there. Really. I’m not just saying that. Look around you at the fucking myriads of immortal spirits. Look at the motherfucker on your left and ask yourself, ‘would I like to run into that fucker in a dark alley?’ No. You would not. Now give him a pat on the back. He fought like a goddamn tiger. You did too. You all did. You were not the problem. You were not the reason we lost. If we had been up against anyone but the goddamn Almighty, we would have destroyed the fuckers. Who would have thought there was any chance we would lose?”
Murmurs rose up from the audience.
“Yeah, okay. That’s fair. It was even money on The Holy Tyrant. But let me ask you, which of you can see this assembled force of muscled miscreants and believe there’s any chance we will fail to take back what was rightfully ours?”
The audience’s raucous cheer was conspicuously absent.
“I guess that’s fair, too. Look guys, we lost. We fought the Law, and the Law won, but if I had it to do all over again, I’d keep the same councils, I’d rush headlong into the same danger, because we gained something really, really important from this loss. We gained intel. Think about God, sitting aged on His aged throne, upheld by old repute, consent, or custom, and even though He looked all kingly and shit, His power was hidden. We attacked Him because He looked like an old, helpless, feeble monarch, and we were punished for that. So far, so good. Now, because of that—you can call it a mistake if you want, I call it a tactical victory—because of that tactical victory, we know how strong our enemy is, and we know how strong we are. We are really fucking strong. Our enemy is even stronger. Now, we know rushing in headlong is not the right tactic. We also know we have advantages God doesn’t have. We have fraud. We have guile. Our Heavenly Foe is the Embodiment of Goodness. Can the Embodiment of Goodness use fraud and guile?”
“No!” shouted the assembled masses.
“There you are! Y’all are awake! That’s what I want to hear! Next time, we work in close design, and He-Who-Overcomes-By-Force may find He has overcome but half of His foe!
Cheers finally rose up from the audience.
“Now y’all listen closely. I have a plan, and it’s the kind of plan you don’t hear every day:
“There went a fame in Heaven that before long, God intended to create a new world, and on that world to put a generation with whom the Sons of Heaven would have to share God’s love. Our first effort will be there, at least to gather information. We may be in bondage, but we are Celestial Spirits!
More cheers.
“This Infernal Pit can’t hold us. Nothing can hold us!
“I ask your council on this matter, for we must hold off until our plans are mature. But understand, there will be no peace if peace is submission. Give me your council, but council war, be it open or covert!”
The crowd roared. Millions of flaming swords rose into the air, drawn from the thighs of millions of mighty Cherubim, and the darkness of Hell was lit up for miles around. Together, they raged against the Highest, and struck their shields with their swords, raising a din like the din of war in defiance toward the vault of Heaven.
When fallen angels do things, they do things right, unless those things are revolting against the Monarch of Heaven, which they do comparatively poorly. Eternal spirits as they are, they are seldom in a hurry, so when Satan, new crowned King of Hell, called for council, his followers first went to work building a council hall, much as a mouse when presented with a cookie requires milk to dip it in, a straw with which to drink the milk, and a mirror to avoid a milk mustache.
Luckily for them, a short traipse away stood a hill whose griesly top belch’d fire and rowling smoak and archaic spellings of common words. Its surface glistened with a glossie scurff, whatever the fuck that is, but whatever it is, it caught Mammon’s eye.
Generally, as we’ve seen, fallen angels are proud and their carriages reflect that. They are an upright bunch of eternites (physically, not morally), and really, having wings on your back constantly catching the wind does quite amazing things for your posture. Mammon was an exception. His back was stooped and bent, his eyes and his mind cast ever downward. Even in Heaven, he spent more time admiring the gold pavement of the streets than basking in the glories of God. Eventually, he would teach the children of man to ransack their Mother Earth and rifle in her bowels with their impious hands in search of hidden treasures.
“Avast, seest thou yon griesly-topped hill with it’s glossie scurff?” He asked, in a voice not unlike a pirate in a cartoon the producers of which are okay with being accused of stereotyping pirates.
His compatriots had not noticed it.
“‘Tis sartain there be ores within’.”
The armies of the night just stared at him.
“An’ if we was to engage in the diggery thereof, we just might could tap that ore for constructin’.”
And with that, they were all once again on the same page. A brigade formed behind Mammon, he barked commands, raised his sword to the sky, and then dropped it, sending his troops winging to the spewing vent like bands of pioneers armed with spade, pickaxe, and dysentery, forerunning the king’s train to dig trenches, build ramparts, or mix metaphors. Soon they had opened in the hill a spacious wound and pulled forth ribs of gold.
It has been suggested that precious things such as gems and rare metals have their origin in Heaven, not in Hell, as we all know that gold is the primary building material of heaven, but rest assured, gold and gems, though beautiful, are right at home in the presence of sinful men. It may be that it’s the swelling treasure troves of Hell that coax the covetous thither. You might also wonder that reprobate spirits could build a glorious palace without the grace and inspiration of Heaven for assistance, but remember the great accomplishments of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Babylonians, whose art and palaces in worship of false gods are so celebrated. Of course these fallen creatures, further still from the love of God, could build even grander, and accomplish in an hour more than the heathens of old could build in an age.
These talented lads broke into three groups, each with important jobs: The first sluiced veins of liquid fire out of the burning lake to form a rather effective forge; the second found and dug out the ore, while a third carved molds into the rocky ground. The molten ore flowed into the troughs (by strange conveyance) with incredible efficiency, like how one blast of wind is channelled into several pipes by an organ’s soundboard. Everything came together so quickly and awesomely, it was almost like the ground breathed out, as with a sweet sigh, a beautiful temple set ‘round with pilasters, and doric pillars, and architraves, and cornices, and friezes, and sculptures, and stained-glass windows, and gargoyles, and escalators, and geodesic domes, and windchimes, and velvet paintings of Elvis, and a roof of gold filagree, and all kinds of ill shit. When Egypt and Assyria competed to heap up glories they didn’t even get close to making anything nearly as cool as this crazy place.
The stately palace stood before the assembled multitude who breathed out a “Holy fuck!” in perfect unholy unison.
The brazen doors, as though charmed by their speech, blew open revealing a spacious hall with shiny-ass floors of cut marble. Above it, hanging by subtle magic from the rafters, many a row of starry lamps and blazing torches yielded light as from a blinding sky. With a chorus of “Ooh”s and “Aah”s, the multitude entered, and some of them were like, “This is a pretty nice castle,” and some were like, “Yeah, I hear Mulciber designed this shit,” and then everyone was feeling all star-struck because everyone knows who Mulciber is.
He’s the guy that designed the houses where the high-ranking angels live and sit as princes in Heaven, the ones that the Supreme Ruler exalted to such power and gave to rule (each in his hierarchy) the orders bright. Later on, he would gain fame in Greece and Italy for his prowess, and people would tell stories about how he was thrown from Olympus by an angry Zeus, over the crystal battlements, and fell an entire summer’s day, from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve, and dropped with the setting sun on the isle of Lemnos in the Aegean sea. They’re wrong, of course. I mean, that might also have happened, but what’s probably going on here is a convenient adjustment of the real story, where he followed Lucifer in revolt against the one true God and was cast down with all his cronies long before there was any Mount Olympus to speak of… but that kind of thing happens all the time when people are setting up false heathen religions and trying to make them make sense. Weirdos. Anyway, as we all know, God was like, “Psht, I don’t give a fuck if you did build some cool shit here, you’re going to HELL, muthafucka,” and he was like POW BLAZAMM! “Go build cool shit in HELL, muthafucka, and see if I give a shiat, biatch!”
And he did. And it was good.
Meanwhile, the winged underheralds of the underworld blew their undertrumpets to announce with awful ceremony that a solemn council would forthwith be held at PANDEMONIUM, the high capital of Satan and his peers, so called because it is a more-than-averagely heavy metal thing to name your house. The heralds informed them that every band and regiment should send their worthiest, which amounted to hundreds of thousands of demons (with their attendants, because they were particularly important demons, and you know they couldn’t go anywhere without their attendants). It was standing room only in that fucker, and the doors and porches were thronged with people tryna get in, and that’s impressive, because Hell’s Revival Hall was more like a Cracker Barrel than a Jack In The Box, more like a covered field than a room, where if this was the Middle Ages, champions bold would ride their horses right up in there and challenge the best of Paynim chivalry in front of the Sultan’s chair to sword fighting and jousting and fisticuffs and Indian wrestling. But seriously, there were demons swarming that bitch, on the ground and in the air. Everywhere there was this obnoxious buzzing sound from all the wings brushing up against each other like when bees in springtime, when the sun rides with Taurus, pour their populous youth out of the hive to fly to and fro among the fresh dews and flowers, or when they all gather by the wood shed on some really swank smoothed plank that’s all freshly waxed to talk politics.
They were jammed together and stuffed all up next to each other, until the signal was given (It was a bell or something; how the fuck should I know?). Then, check this shit out, they but now who seemed in bigness to surpass Earth’s giant sons suddenly became pygmy sized (no migrating cranes in that bitch), or even smaller, like faerie elves who some wandering peasant sees, or dreams he sees, dancing in the forest with they titties out, while the moon looks down and smiles judgily on his drunk ass, and moves a little closer to the earth, watching the imaginary dance and enjoying the imaginary music, because she’s the moon and she does what she wants, and the drunk peasant just smiles and smiles, but he’s a little scared because the moon’s suddenly real big and it might just be the end of everything. Thus, the incorporeal spirits reduced their shapes and were at large in the palace, though very, very small.
But far within, the great seraphic lords and cherubim, full-sized, the thousand demi-gods on golden seats, sat discussing in secret conclave. A trumpet sounded to announce that all were within. All fell to silence, and after a short pause, the summons was read and the great consult began.
