Evenstar Lucifer

“Here I stand, helpless and left for dead,”

Abaddon and I got some really weird looks from our wedding planners when I insisted on this being the song we danced to at our reception.  They would have objected a lot more strongly if Abaddon hadn’t chuckled and muttered something about it being highly appropriate.

“Close your eyes, so many days go by/Easy to find what’s wrong,/Harder to find what’s right,”

But then, so did a lot of other things…my choice of color for my wedding gown, for instance. Blood-red with gold lace and embroidery instead of the usual white.  And our insistence on having Belz bake the cake…which he made as a layer of devil’s food and chocolate icing connected by a spiral stairway to a much smaller lemon cake decorated with icing floral designs, connected in turn to a angel’s food cake about the same size as the bottom cake and covered with vanilla frosting.  Our little figurines were on the little middle cake.  We laughed when we saw it, though no one except us got the joke.

“I believe in you!/I can show you that I can see right through/All your empty lies, I won’t stay long/In this world so wrong!”

We refused to get married in a church; we refused to go anywhere near one.  Satan, helpful little best man that he was, hunted down a practicing Satanist priest and had him perform the ceremony.  He was quite pleased to perform the duty/honor when Abaddon dangled a few gold trinkets in front of him.  Although he said we had to do two ceremonies…one ‘for real’, as he put it, and one for the audience.

The real one was performed at midnight in the middle of a forest near a creepy-looking set of graves.  It involved Abaddon and I drinking a cup of each other’s blood…I didn’t mind, and neither did my watching brothers.  Not even Belial, whose eyes were open and glowing throughout.

The ‘fake’ one, the one for the audience, was performed in a park and was decidedly more traditional.  The priest even read from a book with a cross on the front…an upside-down cross, but a cross nonetheless.  

“Say goodbye/As we dance with the devil tonight!/Don’t you dare look at him in the eye/As we dance with the devil tonight!”

For the sake of those of our audience who would disagree with my marrying my brother, I pretended to by one Amy Evenstar, whose family had died many years ago in a tragic accident when she was very young.  Made just about every tabloid and newspaper in existence…I hadn’t realized how famous the seven of us had become in our twenty-odd years on Earth.

Abaddon and I had had to practice dancing every night for almost a month before our wedding because of his hooves, wings, and tail.  I still did most of the work, but we did our best to appear as though he were steering.  I love dancing, I whisper to him when he spins me close again.  He smiles, an aura of peace about him.

“Trembling,/Crawling across my skin/Feeling your cold, dead eyes/Stealing the life of mine,”

I shiver a little when a cold north wind blows right through the thin sleeves of my dress; Abaddon extends a wing to shield me from it, thus making it ring some of the bells Mephis had gleefully strung on them.  It struck me as odd how energetic he was this morning.

So what if it’s unlike me to actually leave the house?  You deserve more honor than me staying in bed and catching a few more winks.  Besides, I wanna see your face outside the mindscape when you open my present, he says upon feeling my thoughts flicker towards him.

My mouth twists up in a grin when I recall how he had spent most of the ceremony sitting down with dull eyes.  He had looked as though he were five seconds away from falling asleep.

“I believe in you!/I can show you that I can see right through/All your empty lies, I won’t last long/In this world so wrong!”

Satan’s eyes flicker through the crowd in curiosity, feeling several brushes of distant familiarity.  We all catch his surprise when we watch the faces flicker through his mind.

Gabriel Raquia.  Raphael Mathey, who had healed us.  We learned after our expulsion from Heaven that he was the Archangel Throne.  Michael Zebul, Archangel Cherub.  Uriel Shamayim, Archangel Power.  Sammael Shehaquim, Archangel Virtue and a close friend of Lucifer Morningstar before the War.  Even Azrael Machanon, Archangel Dominion, and Dobiel Araboth—once Lucifer’s assistant and now his replacement as Archangel Seraph—had found the time to attend our wedding reception.

A soft and oddly sane flicker from Belial brings other, less notable angels to our attention.  Their minds were laid open, much further than we knew they would ever be otherwise, and Abaddon and I mindspeak them all at once.  Thank you.  All of you.

The Creator does not approve.  But you already knew that, Dobiel and Azrael tell us; Azrael’s mind is too controlled for us to tell what he feels, but we can feel just the slightest flicker of amusement from Dobiel’s mind.

“Say goodbye/As we dance with the devil tonight!/Don’t you dare look at him in the eye/As we dance with the devil tonight!”

A few of the angels—and all the Archangels save for Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael—filter out during our dance, either to do virtuous angel things or to sneak off to do ‘dirty human things’ as I’d once heard Uriel name similar actions.  Mephis pointedly looks the other way when he spies a group of Principalities flirting with a gaggle of giggly girls.

“Hold on!/Hold on!”

Abaddon spins me around in several fast pirouettes; I can’t help but laugh, and the joy in Abaddon’s mind is more than clear.  I know exactly what he’s thinking even without him forming the thoughts in the mindscape.  He would happily die listening to my laughter, happily die looking at my smile for him.

I bend backwards over his arm when the spinning ends, let him have the full force of my glowing smile.  Even I could tell that was what it was.

“Say goodbye/As we dance with the devil tonight!/Don’t you dare look at him in the eye/As we dance with the devil tonight!”

In all my joy and excitement, I almost lose track of the Satanist priest; but then I see him conferring with Belz and Sama about something or other.  Both their minds are closed, but their message is not that they don’t want to share in our joy but that the priest asked them to.  I smile slightly, understanding.  Smart man; I’m glad Satan found him.

“Hold on!/Hold on!”

This time, Abaddon picks me up and swirls me around above his head easily.  I laugh again, barely noticing the looks of surprise on the faces of those watching us dance.  I’d designed my dress with this very move in mind.

“Ooh…goodbye.”

What I had not planned on was Abaddon’s kissing me full on the lips just as the final word of the song was whispered.  I kissed him back as readily and passionately as if it had been planned.  But all my brothers could feel what I was thinking.

I had never been kissed in all my days in Hell.  I had lusted for Raphael, but that had never gone anywhere.  In all the times Abaddon had needed to comfort me for one reason or other, we had never kissed.  Neither of the two weddings the priest had held had called for a kiss.

When the music falls back into silence, and the audience starts clapping, the only thing I can think is My first kiss, smiling in true happiness at my husband.