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The cold kiss of a blade between his ribs. Collapsing to the ground, covered in dust and ash, all sensation draining from his body. The all-encompassing cold of the Morningstar before him, the electric wrongness of the rift at the corner of his consciousness. The flicker of fire around his skeleton, the rotting, tarry dregs of his soul burning out.
Further back.
Pain. Excruciating pain, flames charring and blistering skin into charcoal. Blades piercing and slicing and mutilating flesh. Hooks holding back flaps of skin for easy access, organs spilling out onto blood-stained floor. Worms and beetles crawling up his throat, forcing their way through his eye sockets. All the while, whispered words of guilt and torment, ridicule and mockery, crooned in a hideous sing-song voice.
Further back.
Distant, echoing howls in the night. The encroaching cold, brought on with the blood-chilling horror of running out of time. The hot puffs of breath from a beast he could not see. Two beasts. The clacks of nails against cobblestone, the drip of saliva, the quiet growls that pierced through to the bone. The agonizing ripping through his flesh, the fangs against his throat, jaws that clenched around his very soul.
Further back.
Pricking his finger for the umpteenth time with a needle, watching the blood well up crimson. Letting the pain distract him from his mother’s callous words and calculated disregard. Sliding a ring onto the finger of a beautiful woman and feeling nothing, his heart and mind as cold as the gold she wore. Falling into the beds of a string of lovers, handsome men who could actually move his heart to feel something, all the while betraying the trust of his wife and son. Drowning himself in the depths of a bottle, spending more mornings waking up in the ditch out back of the pub than not. Blinking open bleary eyes to be greeted with a puddle of his own sick and hating himself all the more for it.
Back to the sta-
Further back.
For the split second that he could have a thought of his own, Crowley was shocked. Every time, for every time, the cycle of nightmares and guilt restarted after that memory. What else was there for him to see? What else could he possibly have to regret?
Leaves. Vines and trees and flowers and shrubs. A garden – no, The Garden. Bright light and ever-shifting fractals and warmth and joy and life. Grace. The feeling of wind and aether through chocolate-brown feathers. A body hundreds of feet tall, ethereal and primordial and rustling like sheaves of parchment, yellowed and curling with age. Seeing the Father’s – his Father’s – world through many eyes, on the faces of a barn owl and a viper, and a central face in the form of a blank porcelain mask.
A slow-creeping cold, like frost crawling in from the corners of a window pane. An important Message to deliver. The feeling of his body condensing down, down, down, sinuous and scaled. Curling around a gnarled branch of a tree, whispering Truth and Temptation in equal measure. Hiding behind his brothers as another took the Fall, imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, a crime that wasn’t a crime, but a Test.
Centuries rolling by, growing distant from his siblings in favour of watching their charges. Centuries followed by millennia, distance festering into disillusion. Pain, pain that no being of Hell, not hound nor demon nor Grand Inquisitor, could ever hope to achieve. The act of taking a silver spoon to his very heart and soul and essence in one and carving it out of him, inch by horrible inch. Flame and tempest and fear and then –
And then.
For the first time since sealing Lucifer away in that horrible other world, Crowley opened his eyes. For the first time in almost four hundred years, Kyriel remembered.
He had no idea how long it had been since he awoke. There was no way to tell time within the Empty, no technology that could function (Crowley had checked both his modern Rolex and his antique pocket watch; neither functioned) and no change in the eternal darkness to suggest whether it had been days or decades.
Crowley hadn’t managed all that he had in his life and unlife by being sloppy or acting hastily. As soon as his eyes opened, he felt the star-hot rush of grace within him once more, somehow reunited with his body in this literally Godless realm. Only a moment later, he felt the world rumble around him.
It seemed that the master of the Empty wasn’t happy with this development.
He had no resources in the Empty, no network of informants or spell ingredients or weapons of any sort. On top of that, he had essentially no information on how this place worked. He had only himself, and all he could do was run.
Or, more specifically, fly.
It had been many, many years since he last had wings. Fortunately for him, it seemed that using them was like riding a bike – you never really forgot. Chocolate brown feathers pushed him through the vast Nothingness, not to escape, but to evade. He could feel the Empty’s inky ire chasing him throughout its domain, never quite catching up but never very far behind.
“Crowley…” it hissed into his mind, sing-song and despicable. “Fergus!” it barked, a sharp and blood-curdling threat. “Kyriel,” it whispered, falsely saccharine sympathy dripping like venom from its voice. Every time it spoke, he had to fight back a yawn, force his heavy eyes to stay open, keep the swirling sheets of paper of his trueform moving fast enough to fight off the lethargy. He had to stay awake.
He was bloody Crowley; he wasn’t about to let a self-important pile of goo get the better of him. It didn’t work with Dick Roman, and it wasn’t going to work with the Shadow at his heels.
Still, he couldn’t fly forever. His wings were ancient, and yet brand new. They weren’t yet used to working for such extended flights, and he needed to stop on occasion to rest them. While he was grounded, he took the opportunity to investigate his circumstances more.
He passed by the fallen bodies of countless angels and demons and reapers. He assumed there were many more than what he was able to see; the few that he could see, he only caught fleeting glimpses of, frozen in terror and trapped in their nightmares, before they melted back into the darkness. Of course, he realized it would be prudent to wake them at some point, if only because their vast numbers would surely overwhelm the Empty should they be conscious.
As it was, he had no time to follow that course. Right now, it was a matter of survival. Crowley slowly stood from where he knelt in the black, shaking his wings out and getting ready to fly.
A shiver scuttled like insects down his spine. He’d taken just a second too long, too curious and too lost in thought to pay attention to his surroundings. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement. The pitch void of that realm rippled and curdled, and a figure melted out of the space beside him. A few seconds later, and that shape rearranged itself, colour bleeding in the way it typically bled out of a person, its limbs and proportions contorting to shape itself like Lovecraftian clay.
“Stop hiding from me! Stop running away!” The Empty shrieked, wearing Crowley’s own face as a mask. “Go back to sleep!”
Crowley smirked, the perfect inverse of the expression on the Shadow’s face; all this power, all this terror and torture at its disposal, and it threw a tantrum when a single one of its playthings didn’t do exactly as it wanted.
“Get used to disappointment, love.” Crowley tipped his head in the Empty’s direction, and then fully spread his wings. “I’ve got places to be. You know how it is.”
The enraged screams of the Empty rang in Crowley’s ears as his wings pushed him through its realm and far away.
