Chapter Text
Prologue
In Utah, there was a forest.
No one remembered when the forest was placed there, neither angel nor demon could recall. And the ones who had been on earth the longest, just have never gotten around to visiting the state it was in. They after all rarely left the little bit of the world they both loved the most. Or perhaps, it was they didn’t want to be away from the other. Thus they weren’t even aware of its general existence.
Much to the frustration of their godchild, who was attempting to compose a report of the dangers of climate change and human activity on the oldest organisms in the world. Though he really should know better than now to ask his godparents for help on reports, especially history ones. Crowley was shameless trying to convince him to do a report about Alpha Centauri instead, but that didn’t fit the criteria of the report. As humans could not influence Alpha Centauri yet nor was it alive.
So far, Adam Young had found out a few simple facts about this forest. Such as the realization that it was an odd forest, one of the oddest.
There were over forty seven thousand quaking aspens in this forest, which, in reality, was a single living organism. After all, the trees weren’t separate individuals, they belong to a single root system, the oldest in fact, that expanded over a hundred acres. One godfather commented that he wouldn’t mind seeing it at some point. The other did love plants, no matter how much he protested the affection.
The Pando, the Trembling Giant, great titles for such a plant. But it has another. For all these facts, Adam did not know the greatest secret of this wood. Deep and deeper, held in the roots the heart of the plant itself is a glowing essence. A grace so bright and so old that it was hidden on the world before an apple even came to being.
In fact, as if amused by the notion of such a thing, one of the trees at the very heart of Pando, grew a single apple. A fruit the tree had no business producing, after all it grew from sprouts from the root system. But the Universe had a sense of humor and thus an apple grew. It was small at the moment, too small to really even see, and it was waiting. For one single instant to set in motion a series of events that neither Adam nor his god parents were really prepare for. But most of all, it was the start of a story.
A story of heaven and a story of hell.
A story of four archangels once again roaming the earth, of four brothers reuniting again.
A story of Raphael, lost and forgotten. Long since assumed dead by both parties, but no one knows how he died. Though he didn’t. He in fact liked to claim he merely sauntered vaguely downwards that he hadn’t really meant to fall.
But most of all, a story about Crowley and Aziraphale.