Before The First Word-Chapter 60: Ch-: Helel and Vothanael

[A huge shoutout to @Cyclop_Tempest as a thank you for the golden tickets!! This Chapter is in tribute to you]

Lucifer stopped walking when the light found him.

The sourceless light. It found him the way it found everyone in this place -- without preference, without distinction, simply yes, you too.

He went very still when it landed on him. Not the performed stillness -- he had set the performed surface down in London with the glass, and he had not brought it with him.

The stillness of something receiving something it had not expected. The stillness of something that had not stood in this quality of light since before the fall and was discovering it had not forgotten what the quality felt like.

It felt like before.

That was the word that arrived. Before. The word Amara had given to Vothanael on day four. Before -- direction, weight, the gravity of the place you came from.

He stood in the sourceless light of the garden built for the thing he had known before anything else existed, and before arrived in him with the full weight of everything it carried.

He breathed.

The garden received this with its usual equanimity. As though one more being standing in it were simply the most natural thing.

Just another thing that now lived here.

. . .

"Helel."

Gabriel’s voice.

Not loud. Not across the garden -- she had crossed the garden while he was still standing in the light, with the ease of something that had been moving toward this moment since before the moment could be defined.

She stopped one pace from him. The same distance she had stopped from Vothanael.

Her hands were at her sides. Her face reflecting that it was not performance -- an honest thing, the face of someone standing in front of the whole point of what they had been carrying for all the long years in the distance.

He turned to face her.

The name. His name -- the one before the fall, the one that predated everything that had been built in the fall’s wake, the one she was the only being still alive who would use.

She used it the way she used everything: directly, without armour, because the truth did not need protecting and neither did she, not from her own brother who was cast down.

He looked at her.

His face was doing something it had not done in a span that had no agreed number.

The composed mask -- not gone, he would not have said it was gone -- had stepped to the side of whatever was underneath it.

The black hair. The dark eyes. The face he had arranged into the most effective available armour for all the long years since the distance began.

Beneath the facade: something older, more genuine. Something that existed before the facade was built as a defence mechanism.

He looked at her for a long time.

She looked back.

The garden was completely still. The sourceless light held. The crew had not moved from their place.

Vothanael was watching from near the seventh tree -- the forty-five degrees arrived, slow, the full quality of his attention angled at the meeting of two existences he had sensed before he was awake to know them.

He watched with the quality of someone recognising something. He did not have all the words for it yet. He was building his dictionary.

Lucifer’s hands moved first.

Not his conscious decision. They never were, tonight.

His hands had been making decisions without him since London, since the glass went down the drain, since the coat.

They moved before he had resolved the distance between the composed surface and whatever lived under it -- moved before the resolution, because now the hands did not require a resolution.

He put his arms around her.

She had been waiting exactly for this for so long.

She embraced him. The full quality of her warmth bleeding through the contact -- the warmth that did not ask anything in return, that simply was, the way she simply was.

The warmth of something that had loved him since before love had a word, that had loved him through the fall and through the distance and through all the long years of the curated melancholy and the glass on the windowsill, that had not stopped loving him for a single moment of any of it and would not now.

He held on.

He held on with the quality of something that had been holding on in the wrong direction for too long and had just been given something to hold on to instead.

The garden breathed.

The sourceless light held steady. The seventh tree’s canopy spread gold over the whole northern end of everything.

The six trees in their full flower. The wildflowers open. The amber blossoms. The grass at its deepest green.

The crew stood in it and did not speak.

Vothanael looked at the two figures in the sourceless light. At the frequency that was familiar and the other frequency that was familiar and the two of them together making something he had known before he knew anything, in the dark before knowing was a capacity he possessed.

He looked at it with the forty-five degrees tilt of his head.

His face held something.

The word arrived slowly -- the way all the words arrived, from the inside out, finding the skin of the thing before the thing had a name.

He had been building this entry since the hug with Gabriel. He had been building it since Amara’s palms flat in the grass behind him. He had all the pieces of it now.

He pressed his hands flat in the grass.

The blades settled. The deeper green.

"Family..." he said.

To no one. To the garden. To the word, which had arrived at its correct address.

The seventh tree held its canopy over all of them -- Vothanael and Gabriel and the reunited distance that was no longer the whole of the space between Helel and his sister.

Amara and Kinvara and the sixty years and the kitchen table, Uriel keeping his careful watch, the crew in their positions.

The Wall at the northern end with its four declarations pressed into the stone since before the stone agreed to hold them.

All of them, here.

The garden did not need to say it.

It had been built for exactly this warmth... A nexus where things would revolve around while basking in its warmth.

. . .

He let go of Gabriel’s hand.

Slow and deliberate. The same economy he brought to everything -- each finger separating in sequence, the contact ending in the precise way of something that had decided the contact was finished rather than lost it.

He stepped back, just one pace. He looked at Gabriel... What moved through his face then was not the composed facade --

The composed facade was still in London with the empty glass... but something quieter than what the surface had been covering.

A thing that had been put down and picked back up and was being held differently than it had been held for all the long years of the distance.

He looked at her for a moment. He did not have a name for what he had just done. He was not going to look for one. Some things were better carried than bothered with names and descriptions.

Then he turned.

He turned and looked at Vothanael, sitting in the grass near the seventh tree with his hands flat in the deeper green.

The assessment ran behind his eyes the way it always ran -- the speed of something that had been calculating across more time than calculation had been invented by humans -- His assessment returned its answer, and the answer was:

Unknown.

He had never sensed an unknown. Not once. In all the long years of the world, across every order and every power and every being of every rank that had ever moved through the space he occupied, the calculation had always returned something.

A number. A position in the hierarchy of what existed. Something to designate, something to place, something to know where to stand in relation to.

He had every hierarchy memorised. He had contributed to every architecture of every hierarchy since the advent of Creation as the other First Born.

Every sovereign darkness in the mortal world and the realm below it, every principality and dominion and named power -- he had a position for all of them, and his position relative to all of them was the same position it had always been.

His existential assessment looked at Vothanael.

It came back: unknown. Unknown magnitude. Unknown register. Unknown category.

Not above his rank -- above the concept of rank. Not outside the hierarchy -- prior to the existence of the hierarchy.

The hierarchy had been built in the silence after this thing ended what existed before the hierarchy had a base to be built on

Lucifer looked at the unknown thing sitting in the garden grass.

The decision formed the way decisions formed -- not chosen, arrived at.

His hands had been ahead of him all evening. Now it was his feet. He took a step toward the deeper green.

Toward the forty-five degrees turned north, toward the figure who had looked at him with the quiet recognition of something that had known him before he had a name to be known by, and had simply filed the meeting and moved on.

Show no uncertainty.

He never had. It was, honestly, among the most consistent things about him.

But by God was he about to do something foolish...

To be Continued...

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