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If anyone had ever asked him, paradise would have no fields of golden wheat or skies of azure blue or ruby fruit bursting with amber juice; there would be nothing but one man and the contempt in his hands would be enough to kill Belial thrice over. But nobody had ever asked him.
Belial opens his eyes.
He is no more than the phantom of a sacrosanct stillicide stoic in his hands; an elegant synthesis of gristle and sinew, as cold to the touch as stirred to the sentiment. Silent, silent, silent, as the past two thousand years, silent. The cicadas cry their misfortunes to an unsympathetic ear.
Who would care for the cast aside?
“Wake up, please.”
And if there was any God—and if He were listening—then Belial would’ve promised anything to him in that moment; anything to see Lucilius once more.
“And why do you go such lengths for him? Power?” Beelzebub spoke, and Belial had to tip his head back and laugh.
“Love, of course. Love.”
There was, with Beelzebub, the same faint traces of malignancy that perfumed Lucilius like hyacinths in the spring rain; but it settled, bruise-faint, on the surface of his being, no deeper than the snow over the silent land. And that was the difference between them—the insufficiency that cropped like locusts over the kill, that clutched them dearly in its palms, that stoked every semblance of adoration; it could remain no longer than the thought of surrender.
He was almost endearing, almost enlightened, almost enucleated. But almost sang no praises. Almost damasked no dawns. Almost awoke no dreamers.
He presses his forehead against that still form but the skin remains cold. He closes his eyes but the minutes march in rigid formation.
“Please,” there is no one to answer his prayers.
He wants to force himself in the crevasses of Lucilius’ body so deep that the memory of it etches into the contour of his being; the grooves of his contempt, the ridges of his refusal. He can only ever possess Lucilius when he is dead, he realizes, and the memory of his majesty is a still, pliant thing; pressed flat as the lepidopterist pins his favorite butterfly to the board, clipping the grace of his wings into something that will love him back. Bolt by bolt brittle, bolt-by-bolt belittled.
The idiot that he was, Orpheus never had enough faith to save himself, let alone another—how dare he claim that he loved? And if Lucilius never awoke, and if his past two thousand years are wasted, and if he is killed by Beelzebub, fruitlessly, remorselessly—at least he can say he never even thought to look back.
If Belial had wrung the fruit of paradise in his own stained hands for Lucilius’ sake, he would have complained that it was too sweet; if he had separated every grain of salt from the sea, Lucilius would have asked why it proved so salty; if he had wrought the world to an obedient heel underneath his tempered hand, Lucilius would question why he had not taught it to beg! He was an insatiable being, by nature or in spite of it, who saw the world and found it wanting; he would tear what he loved apart at the seams merely to understand it, and in understanding, invite it to stand beside him once more. He was—well, he was dead. Hey, nobody was perfect. And Lucilius certainly wasn’t close.
But still, but still—! His voice, his voice, the timbre, the pitch, the lull and wake! The vicious stirrings of self-inflicted mockery, gouging every idea of aberration absent and discerning adoration in its wake.
To go south in the winter, to go east in the night, to lie amongst the wisteria blooms; sordid in violet, sullen in victimhood. It is like seeing him fallen again. Every time, his heart lurches as if it were the first.
Outwait the stars, the moons, the platitudinal arc of their pathetic ascents. What did their little fractal fires matter? Lucilius shone dimmer than any devotee, darker than any demiurge.
That was the truth of him, as much as could be grasped in both hands--that is to say, none at all.
It is useless, fruitless, futile, to obsess with the faults of conduction; the abstractions of design and designation, creation and causation. In what image was he carved, with what ceremony was he cursed? Why did he strike, violent in every verisimilitude, to all of his brethren, who ceased to retain the simplest of syllogisms; a practicality of phylogeny, a vulgarity of vestigiality.
I am not what He has crafted. I am not what I have created. I am not at all.
If he could rip the sordid, squalid core out of his chest and force it in the cavity where a heart should be, and spark that flame of life with a thousand jagged glass shards, Etruscan and horrid—he would, he would! To see that pale glare, the indolent curve of his purloined mouth, the white trail of bannister and baulderade; to ask him a question, any question, the only question that bubbles like a myriad mystery mired in his being; to ask why, why? Why was he so lovely, why did he inspire such love, why did he spur devotion with a languid drive of the whip—why was he so—
“They say,” he speaks, “the song outlives the singer.”
“Then I pray yours ends as quickly as promised.”
The feathers around his shoulders curl like undignified pets, offended at the lengths of his obedience.
“Did you ever question,” Beelzebub’s voice, ringing so close to thunder, “—if you were made to love him?”
The explanation would be easy, fitting; perfect in a way nature never was, and that was why it could never be true.
“Now, what would be the fun in that?”
There was pleasure in the vibrant violence that brimmed so egregiously and perilously at the hands of those who hated him; pleasure sharp and red and deeper than any hand could carve into his core. It is the same pleasure that Lucilius denies him so strictly.
And if he didn’t fight, if he didn’t strain every thought and thin veneer of identity so stringently, so urgently for Lucilius’ sake, there would be no doubt he would be cast aside, asunder, amongst nothing. There was only one thing and one man who could stand by Lucilius and his eyes were no redder than the water’s surface.
“You are not my equal ,” he spoke, as simple as scripture.
And scripture, sacrament, psalm it is; commandment and creator both! It is—he thinks—the ideal of his self, the earnest seed around which the flesh moulds; the idea of being, of being, of being not enough. What he lacks carves the shape of his figure in red and white.
The wonder lingers, the shame remains.
“Pathetic,” Beelzebub says. “I will finish this sorry farce without you.”
“Go on ahead. We’ll catch right up.”
And then he is alone in the far corners of the world with nothing but the shadow of the man he loves and the yawning Hesperidaen abyss below.
Belial closes his eyes.