The Infernal Serpent

Lucifer had withdrawn aside from official requests months ago. The angels watched and waited. It wasn't the first time their King had turned his back on the angels to dwell on some matter or another. As weeks turned into a month, and more, they started to whisper. Some had gone to Lucifer and been turned away. He was becoming short tempered, angry, and volatile.

Death listened in silence. He knew the reason but spoke no words of the matter. It was not his place nor did he know what the fallout would be if he spoke, creating a gulf in the family between father and children and between the twins was not something Thnisko wished to be responsible for. And he held silent from the shadows, often seeking out Deet's company to be free of the pain he felt from his father. She asked and he spoke of family problems with no specifics. She understood though and simply seeing a father bearing depression was enough of a reason in her eyes.

Today though when Belial and Lucifer had nearly came to blows in anger over a trifle matter Thnisko knew silence could not stand any longer. He debated internally about who to speak with and who might do the most good. There were things about this situation that required reservation, tact, and an ability to manage Lucifer when he barely wanted company.

Thnisko wondered if Balthazar already knew the situation, and if so, things would be more dire than Death expected. Still, that was who he sought out in the villa. He knew his other father was present. That is where Death headed, steps heavy with worry on many levels.

With war brewing, a sensation both of his war angels felt, Lucifer took every opportunity for peace, quiet, some serenity before things exploded. He had been away at council and came back mid-morning, of course, seeking his partner who surely noticed his absence all night. He found him painting and stopped, silent in the archway into the garden. There was little way to tell whether angel or human was in control, though the realism in the painting suggested it was Balthazar. While the jacket hanging off to the side meant the human had overheated. Perhaps they were both awake, or taking turns. There was no way to tell sometimes aside from mannerisms or how they spoke with him.

Lucifer stood, watching. There were the surface impressions. The reds of heat that left a swirl of after impressions in the air as Balathazar moved the paint brush around. The flare of red in the air slowly fading through oranges, blues and finally disappearing into purples as the air returned to its previous temperature. The ultraviolet mingled in purples that radiated from other areas or went dark where it was absorbed. The Blaschko Lines on the arms glowed faintly in his sight; bright ultramarine and black lines that were a map back to the single cell that started Levi's life when he was conceived.  There was beauty to the human body, to Levi's body, left in the dazzling interactions with radiation. Lucifer remembered Balthazar telling him once that every angel had a perfect vessel, that Levi was his perfect counterpart. There were hints of it there between the lines on the body and the way the feathers of the angel wings matched in perfect pattern. A continuation of one another.

The quantum nature of his wings disrupted the electromagnetic spectrum. Waves scattered every which way from their hazy presence and the thousands of blinking eyes. Those eyes were intensely focused on a bunch of flowers. The feathers and the eyes scattered energy differently. The eyes, it was gentle barely bending the waves, but the feathers altered the speed to cause red shift when they were flat on, and blue shift when they were angled against the radiation streaming in from other locations. Light came in one color and scattered away in different hues. He knew the wings were golden fawn colored but his unnatural sight watched those bend away from the yellow of golden into oranges and greens as the wavelength fluttered away from its incoming range. They even held the dark midnight lines of radiowaves, a sign of a magnetic field. The thought of his lovers wings having a magnetic pull nearly disrupted the quiet with a laugh Lucifer barely kept inside. These lines were hazy with the blacklight purple of X-rays; the quantum state, or the wings themselves heating the electrons in the surrounding air until they appeared near white in the seraphim's vision. Hints of pink and peach vibrated around the areas of hot electrons. As the atoms in the nearby air emitted gamma radiation and photons, trails of lilac pink led off in all directions like a streamer filled party favor.

The dance of light and color was merely the mundane and didn't even touch the spiritual. Beneath it all there was the angel, a glow of color and fire, emotions might not be the right word for the aura, memories maybe. He noticed the shift in their dance more with remembrance than emotional change. Emotions were flares like a solar prominence rising wildly to the surface just as they did on so many stars. That was bundled inside the flutter of a human soul, golden and ringed in emotional colors. Nothing was stationary though. The spiritual rotated, clear in the angelic and just enough to disturb the outward shine of a human. It was like a whirlpool of fire that disturbed the water around for miles. Sometimes it abruptly changed directions though Lucifer had no idea why. Suspicion was that it was the Ophan's need for motion that triggered the spiraling light to flip. When that happened it was a riot. Turbulence raced through the boundary between human and angel, but the stir was enough that it affected the mundane radiation too. Fireworks was a poor substitute for an explanation but it was the best word he had for something that was experienced so far beyond language. It was like a kaleidoscope spinning and the radiated fractured light through a sun catcher or some other beveled glass pattern merged and had the light of prism passed through it, scattering the rainbow in sparkling twists and bends. 

Balthazar shifted his wings as he leaned in to look more closely at his subject. Light shifted, shafts blazing in all directions. The greens and oranges flashing from the wings mingled in a dance with the ultraviolet radiation lighting up the leaf surfaces and turning the centers of the flowers to bright spots in the dimness of the surrounding air. Lucifer was dumbstruck, which is why he rarely stares so intently at the angel he adored. He felt hot and dizzy when the wings again straightened themselves. Each feather, thousands or hundreds of thousands of them, each casting its own streamer of light, a wake of fire and heat swirling in the air from their tip, both continuing on and away. Balthazar, when Lucifer paused like this, took up at least four times his physical space with light, color, disturbances in the energy around him.

These were not the only reasons the King found this angel beyond beautiful. He attributed the difference to his belonging to a different creation. It was like a song played in a slightly different key. It wasn't discordant and sounded similar but just different enough to cause the listener to question which song they heard. The gardens around him brimmed with plants and animals who mostly came from Lucifer's own universe. The difference was there, like a melody played in two keys, one common and the other wholly unexpected for the song in question. That was Balthazar in the garden, or even in the Nexus. It was all just beyond expectation. That in itself was a lure felt more acutely when their graces blended, the sight he knew becoming something to be felt, but it made them fit somehow. 

He watched the mundane in the garden. Swirls of reddish heat rising off the surfaces, eddies of color where animals released breath or wind disturbed leaves scattering the ultraviolet. But the angel stood out against it like a bright flower among dark foliage. Balthazar had been the first thing from another universe Lucifer had taken his time to examine. As he leaned in the archway, unblinking, unbreathing, just absorbing what he saw he could remember the moment he really looked with all of his senses. He'd seen everything in his own existence, to encounter something that was a step away had thrown his aesthetic sense into turmoil. Perhaps that was part of the reason he fell so hard, so fast. That stunned feeling still lingered months later. The contrast was unavoidably exotic and beautiful.