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Millions of young stars and explosive nebulae expanding, drifting away, creating beauty in their birth and death, widening the possibilities of the Ineffable Tapestry.
God had chosen Crowley to create Time, to swell Space with volume, to wind the key of endless chain reactions, and had placed him at the head of an efficient team of creatives.
At the time, God could only conceive of the kind of worship Her creatures offered Her, and had decreed it this way, so that they should render complete obedience and fulfil Her will.
However, as the culmination of Her most ambitious project drew near — the creation of the Earth — some of Her angels and archangels had begun to doubt, to question why God had placed Creation in their hands if She was truly omnipotent, for instance.
And although everyone seemed to understand that, in any case, the ultimate purpose of all this concerned only Her, it was increasingly brought to Her attention that some of Her creatures had begun to seek logic, to complain, and to ask questions that should never arise in Paradise.
But what truly offended Her was discovering that devotion towards Her was beginning to scatter.
God had reserved for Herself the power of Love and had stripped Her angels of the understanding of it, endowing them with a strict and limited morality.
Yet Love proved to be a power both dangerous and chaotic…
Lucifer’s case had seemed especially painful.
The most beautiful of Her angels, the one most like Herself, the most perfect of Her admirers, now seemed to wonder whether that shared likeness did not grant him the same right to be adored.
And for a while, God turned a blind eye — such was Her love for him!
Because yes: God loved all Her creatures in a maternalistic and fiercely unilateral way.
Yet Lucifer was no longer content with mere obedience, and little by little he began to plant seeds of doubt in those who frequented his company.
And Crowley was one of them.
God could see his influence the moment the red-haired angel admired the results of his team’s work.
There, wide-eyed at the newborn cosmos, Crowley had experienced passion (which was not quite the same, but close enough — and that irritated Her) for all that he had just brought into being, and he had openly disagreed with Her plans.
He had even had the audacity to suggest the possibility of submitting proposals to Her!
Yet something even more striking, and by Her calculations highly improbable, caught God’s attention: the change in the aura of the cherub Aziraphale: It was like a flash, an explosion akin to Crowley’s nebulae in the configuration of his being.
God, surprised, took a moment to realise that the seed, clearly indelible in the angel’s aura, was Love.
It could not be.
It must not be.
It had slipped through Her hands. She could not allow it to spread through Her court, not now, not with the seventh day at hand!
She had to act…
With Her vanity wounded and heavy sorrow, She opened a dark, foul pit, so deep that not the slightest trace of Love could seep into it. And thus, She banished the heretics and the unfaithful, crafted a new code for them, and called them demons…
Spiteful, She even went so far as to write a cruel narrative pitting Her worshippers against the banished in a purposeless war that would end in a wipe-clean and fresh start for the Earth (only the Earth and not the whole Cosmos, because God was exceedingly merciful).
But by the time the first sun of the seventh day illuminated the Earth, God no longer remembered that story, and was busy amusing Herself with Her new Creation.
Sadly, though neither side ever understood these last orders, neither did they forget them…