The Pleasures of Hell

~~50 years before the Arrival~~

~~Keziah~~

Light flooded her mind. Knowledge came next, pouring through her vessel, bestowing her with context and meaning. Light. Mind. Words that had no meaning before now had them.

Wet. She was in water.

She stepped out from under a waterfall and looked around at the room where four other people waited with warm smiles. They wore revealing white silks, beautiful, flowing gold tattoos, and enormous wings of white feathers jutted from their backs.

Angels. Like her.

Keziah took a breath. Yes, that was her name. Keziah. She looked around the room again and took a breath of relief. Home. Etched deep into her mind, she knew, this was home. Heaven. Gold walls that sparkled but did not shine too brightly. White stone. White hanging curtains of see-through silk. A small waterfall flowed down from a colossal hole in the ceiling overhead, entering a shallow pool below that she stood within, water that reached her waist.

She stretched out her wings, engaging muscles she knew she had, but only upon using them for the first time did she truly understand what they were, where they were, and how they were. She did the same for her fists. Strong fists. She looked down at her naked body and admired the perfect beauty of it. She was one of God's warriors, after all, and all angels were beauty and perfection incarnate, crafted and sculpted.

The four angels standing on the edge of the indoor pool gestured to a wall where a giant mirror awaited. She walked through the water and admired her reflection while the water gently flowed around her hips.

She was a muscular woman, with defined abdominals, and strong arms, and thick legs. The knowledge given to her upon birth told her the truth: she was larger than most female angels, a little taller at nearly seven feet tall, and built with a little more muscle, more meat. But despite that, she had a narrow waist, highlighting her feminine figure, and large breasts that sat upon her chest well, pushed outward by the muscle underneath. A few gold tattoos flowed along her dark, dark skin, and her eyes shone a sparkling blue.

No. Not blue. Words flew through her mind, and she latched onto them. Souls would recognize them as blue. She would know them as azure, one of the thousands of God's most beautiful colors.

She blinked at her reflection and ran her fingers along her hair. White, almost shining. A modern choice for hair color, the information in her mind told her. One side of her head had long, flowing hair, while the other was... cornrows? Tiny braids tight to her scalp that ran horizontal along her skull. Beautiful, and modern again.

Modern. What was modern? She dug through her mind and the nigh-infinite knowledge waiting for her there. It was the nineties, according to the information, and the souls that spoke with angels. What were the nineties? And what were souls? She could see the definitions in her mind, but they were just words.

And behind those words were three runes. And these she understood.

She turned and looked at her side in the mirror. Yes, God had given her a body for battle, muscles defined and strong, but also pristine beauty, with a large buttock that complimented her muscular physique and large breasts. A perfect body for one of his soldiers.

She held out a hand to the mirror and summoned potram. In a gentle flash of gold light, she was clothed. The rune was light, like the feather of an angel's wing. She froze and tilted her head, admiring the clothes God gave her. Flowing white silks that did a poor job of covering her skin, but that was not their goal. Their goal was to look gorgeous and be freeing. She smiled, slowly turned, and admired the jewelry: a necklace, earrings, nipple piercings under the silk, a navel piercing, and rings, all subtle, meant to accent her body, not detract attention from it.

The other runes were too heavy for her, royam and batlam. She tried them, took a deep breath, and tried again, but they resisted.

"I am... Keziah."

"Then rest, Keziah," an angel said. "You are mere minutes born. Rest."

She nodded. Rest made sense. Eventually, she would step out of the room, and she knew what awaited her: Heaven, and a billion experiences that would overwhelm her. Souls. Angels. The golden cities of the Heavenly Islands. The beaches of silver and gold sand, and their crystal, brilliant waters.

She stepped out of the pool onto the golden steps, and waited at the door. Not a door, but an archway with only hanging white silk to cover the entrance, and the pool turned into a small river that flowed within a shallow gold trench under the curtains, and out into Heaven beyond.

Another angel nodded deeply to her, and she returned it in kind.

"Keziah, Rapholem. First rank, and freshly born in Yathael," they said.

Rapholem. First rank. Yathael, one of the nine Heavenly Islands. More words her fellow angels did not need to explain to her. She knew them already.

She was an angel. A warrior of God. It was her duty to care for the souls of Heaven, defend them, let them move on and into the Great Tower when they wished, and if it came to it, it was her duty to sacrifice her life to defend Heaven's walls from invaders.

All words. And as she stared at the silk curtain separating her from giving those words meaning, she stopped. But an angel took her hand and smiled at her.

"It is always overwhelming for a newborn angel," he said. "Take your time, Keziah."

She nodded, took a breath, and braced herself. That was what the Rapholem did. They were the shields of Heaven, of God. It was their duty to survive any attack.

She stepped out into the golden city, the center of the Heavenly Island Yathael, and she froze.

Above her, endless galaxies floated by, nebulae and stars, moons and sparking comets. Nighttime in Heaven. What would it look like during the day? Would this facsimile of the surface world, this night sky of wonder and magic, look like the day, with a burning sun searing the sky with all its glory?

She gulped and looked out at the streets before her. Human souls, running and playing, throwing discs or balls to catch. Some flew kites. Some danced on rooftops, or in the archways where white silk curtains were their only barrier between their rooms and the outside world. Some sat on benches in groups and told stories, laughing. Some kissed and hugged each other, but this section of Yathael allowed children, so they did not take it further.

With a trembling step, Keziah walked down the street, and her four angels walked with her. Some children ran by, waved up at her, but wrapped in their own game, they did not wait for her to return it, instead devolving into a mess of laughter as they chased each other, playing tag. Some men and women nodded to her, perhaps knowing she had just been born, or perhaps because they had never seen her before.

They walked past rooms full of souls, sitting on white chairs set in a circle, while a gabriem sat with them, speaking about pain and loss. Keziah listened, rent asunder by words. Parents lost to disease. Siblings lost to shortsightedness. Children lost to tragic accidents. A room for the grieving to grieve, except in reverse. This was the afterlife.

She continued down the gold streets, propelled, each step fraught with mental impact she could not comprehend, but each room she peeked into, each soul she met demanded she keep walking.

A woman watched her husband in a scrying pool; the man still alive, the woman in wait. And nearby, a man did the same with his daughter. Both smiled, watching the most precious people in their existence struggle to live without them. The woman, the man, they would wait for their loved ones in Heaven.

Keziah continued on.

The colossal city of flowing, golden buildings, full of rooms with only curtains for walls, opened up before her. Gardens with sparkling water and small waterfalls. Giant palaces with no walls at all, only pillars, filled with chatting souls wearing white togas and similar attire. Past the city edge, literal clouds awaited, and souls walked over the fluffy white, losing themselves in delightful conversation.

Human laughter. Human delight. It struck her with wonder.

She recognized things before her angel comrades explained them. The sanctum, a giant room with no windows because the contents allowed the people within to experience any fantasy they wanted; a sort of virtual reality, the souls explained, for the truly odd or unique experiences only a human imagination could invent.

As Keziah's wandering took her into a different section of Yathael, the atmosphere changed. Shallow pools sat out in the open, and within, souls and gabriem angels sat, naked. In each and every bathhouse Keziah passed, many of the souls within were having sex, sometimes with each other, but usually with a gabriem.

One gabriem, a male, sat and relaxed in the pool, back to its wall, his elbows resting on the pool edge, while a tiny little woman danced on his lap. A small peek over the man's shoulder showed it was no simple lap dance, but a sexual one, the angel's large girth buried deep inside the woman. Beside her, only a meter away, a female gabriem sat on a male soul's lap, giving a similar dance. Both souls were small compared to the angels, but that only seemed to make them enjoy the sex more.

The sights continued, always the same. In some pools a single male soul spent time with several female gabriem. Sometimes it was the other way around, or the soul and angel were reversed. Sometimes they were the same sex. In some pools, it was an orgy. And on more than a few occasions, she found a pool full of human souls with no angels at all, and the souls pleasured each other with smiles on their faces.

But Keziah never spotted an angel being romantic with another angel, not once.

In the distance closer to the city edge, was a special river. The knowledge in her mind told her what it was, but the sight of the flowing water with gold orbs floating within struck her with awe. The river of memories. Here, souls could summon the memories of someone who had passed on into the Great Tower. The river would give the memories a body to steer, but it would not be a true creation; souls never stayed in Heaven forever, and the ancestral mimic would not have a soul. But if a soul wanted to speak with an ancestor, they could.

As she watched the souls step into the water, and the floating orbs of gold floated past them, it quickly became apparent most souls did not want to summon their ancestors. They wanted to summon their pets, and they did. The river gave the reborn pets bodies, gave them their memories, and even their souls back. Animal souls were unique to human souls, and the river of memories could draw them back from the Great Tower to be reunited with their owners.

Souls stepped out of the river with pets of all kinds. And they always came up from the water with tears in their eyes, as they stepped back onto the gold and white roads of the gold city, their faithful companion at their side or in their arms.

Keziah stayed there for a while, watching souls step into the river, scoop up a gold orb floating by, and summon their memory. Each and every time, their faces lit up with a magnificent wonder that robbed Keziah of breath. She stared at them, fascinated, mesmerized by the hurricanes of emotion the humans brought to bear.

Keziah had been wrong. Dead wrong. She was not beautiful. She was nothing. She was a cutout creation, a sculpted thing with none of the depth of a soul, none of the layers. Souls were a cascade of nuance, an avalanche of experience and growth. Souls were... like the Great Tower.

It was the souls who were beautiful, not angels.

The Great Tower. What was it? Knowledge flowed through her mind, but it lacked any details. The Great Tower was existence. It was life. It was death. It was the world they stood on, and the worlds below. It was where souls were birthed, where they gathered life experience, and brought it back to the Great Tower itself to... to what?

Keziah stretched her wings and took to the air. Something was wrong.

"The library," she said as her angel escort followed her. "Take me there."

The other angels nodded and guided her, but the look on their faces told her what she would find.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Keziah poured through the books. Colossal shelves of gold surrounded her, lined with uncountable knowledge, books with covers of rich colors of angel eyes: quartz, obsidian, amethyst, and silver. Most books were the creations of humans, but the non-fiction books, the ones that accounted of the details of Heaven in her infancy, were written by angels. Diaries. Accounts of the Great Tower through millions upon millions of years. But no account reached back far enough.

There were no answers.

She looked to the angels escorting her, but found only the same disappointment. They sat around the colossal table with her, looked at the books they had all read before, and shook their heads.

"Only the council may read the first books," they said.

Sighing, Keziah picked up her gold book and set it back within the shelves of the great library. She wandered the halls, past hundreds of thousands of books from the human mind, and wandered through the quiet permanence of the books written by angels. Words upon words, and she devoured them, searching for an answer to a question she could not yet articulate.

She stopped and faced the four angels escorting her. They waited, eyes heavy. They knew what she was going to say before she had found the words.

"Where is God?" she asked.

They shook their heads. They did not know.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

They left her after that. It was a process all new angels went through, learning about Heaven, Hell, the Great Tower, life, only to be left confused by the gaps in their knowledge. And once she, a newborn angel, was left empty and confused, her escorts deemed it fit to abandon her to her fate.

Keziah left the great library and sat upon the outer walls circling her home, the Heavenly Island Yathael. Thousands of fellow rapholem stood upon the wall, facing out toward the great clouds of Heaven, and the distant vortex that penetrated its base. Not since the First War had anything from Hell reached Heaven through the vortex, and even that, Keziah could not know for sure, not when the first books were forbidden by the council.

So she sat, letting her legs dangle off the high wall of gold brick, and stared out toward the inside of Yathael, to the great gold city and its flowing streets, tall buildings, and beautiful souls.

"Keziah," a voice said.

She made to stand, but the man shook his head and raised a hand. Instead, the man sat with her, and did as she did, letting his legs dangle over the top of the great wall of gold stone and merlon outcroppings. Humans called them castle walls, and it was true; they looked like the walls of human history. All the stranger for two angels wearing the loose, revealing silks of their potram runes, to sit upon and face within. Some adventurous humans at the base of the wall looked up at them in curiosity, and the new angel spared them a nod.

"Captain Benjamin," Keziah said.

"I didn't realize we'd already been introduced." The man smiled at her. He had dark tan skin, deep eyes, and long black hair with no facial hair. Humans would have described him as Indigenous American, the way they said Keziah looked African. He was handsome, like all angels, but the truth had robbed her of the joy of seeing that handsomeness. He was a cutout creation, like her.

"Others told me to see you," she said. "And I... had planned to do that."

"But?"

"But I am... despondent."

"Oh?"

She nodded and gestured out toward Yathael, a city of joy and beauty and pleasure and healing, with beaches of silver, flowing rivers of crystal blue, and trees of green, all surrounded by white cloud, underneath a sky of stars and nebulae and galaxies. She should have been overjoyed with her existence. She was not.

"I have been born into misery, captain."

The captain sighed, nodded, and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "It has become routine, young angel, that we must apologize to the newly birthed for the state of Heaven. God has abandoned us." The words stung. "The council ignores us. And the purpose of the Great Tower and the inner-workings of its cogs remain an unknowable mystery."

Each word crushed her grace, and she slumped.

"Why was I born at all?" she asked. "Lucifer is trapped in the Forgotten Place -- we can only assume, anyway. The demons war among themselves, and even if they didn't, they could not reach Heaven without Lucifer's help. Heaven does not need new angels. Heaven--"

"For the souls, Keziah."

She shook her head. "I am no gabriem. The souls do not need me, a rapholem. I am... cold, as the souls would say."

Benjamin smiled at her and patted her shoulder with a wing. "I am a gabriem, so listen to my words, young rapholem. Heaven is in a state of decay. Many of us are millions upon millions of years old, and the dread eats at our minds and grace. Some of us are reborn so many times, our previous lives are blurs. Worse still, some angels kill themselves, unable to accept the dread."

"I do not understand. This dread must surely have been a part of God's plan?"

Benjamin shook his head. "I do not think it was ever in God's plan to leave the Great Tower, young rapholem. If we could bask in God's presence, surely the dread would never affect us. But..." He shrugged and gestured out to the city with a wing. "It does not matter. For all the pain and misery you have been born into, it is worth it, Keziah."

"How?"

Benjamin's smile was perfect. The smile of a gabriem, of a man who had helped untold humans, and likely untold angels, for aeons.

"Go to the river of memories."

"I visited--"

"No. Go to the river of memories, young rapholem, and watch. Truly watch. You will understand."

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It took a month before she listened to her captain's order. She spent the first month of her life sitting on the walls of Yathael, watching the city at a distance, and let the talons of the dread sink into her grace. She was a holy warrior of God, and God was nowhere to be found. The only people who might know, the council, would not speak to her or any other angel. Even when a council angel stood at the gate and oversaw the flow of new souls, the council angel ignored all other angels. Silence was an angel's reward for faith and duty.

Before despair dragged her down into an early death, she took to the sky, and flew to the river of memories.

There were many rivers in Yathael. The city was colossal, large enough to house hundreds of millions of souls, and it had many sections. Some sections were lush with green. Others were filled with titanic buildings of gold, with silver ornaments and white silks. The roads shone, and the souls walking them vibrated with joy. But not all souls were happy.

Keziah returned to the first river of memories she had visited on her first day of life. Riverbanks of silver sand sparkled under the starlight above, and this far from the city's center, the air was still with silence. Trees grew tall and wide, covered in lush leaves, and hidden colors glittered within the cracks of their bark. It was a place of quiet, and peace.

The long river showed a few souls, each spaced out and left to their solace, save for their escort. Each soul that came to the river of memories had a gabriem angel, ready to guide and tend them, and many souls leaned on their angel for advice or support as they delved into the past. Some souls summoned the memory of an ancestor, someone who had long since died, went to Heaven--or Hell, had since passed on to the Great Tower, and the river created a soulless vessel for their eternal memory. If you wished to speak with Genghis Khan, you could.