ever be the same again.
“Angels,” Michael said in a low voice. “Throw the traitor
from heaven.”
Michael’s fighters looked at each other for confirmation,
but with a sinking feeling each realized that none of the others
was surprised. Michael drew a golden sword from the sheath
at his side and advanced towards Lucifer. The other archangel
was reaching for his own blade when Appolyon stepped in front
of Michael with his sword bared.
“Step back, Michael,” Appolyon growled.
“What are you doing?” Michael hissed at him. “Step aside.”
“You have no right,” the other angel snapped.
“The LORD gave me the right,” Michael snapped back. He
forced himself to compose himself; the quarrel was with Lucifer,
not with some fool of an angel that was convinced by Lucifer’s
silken words about what the world should have become.
“Step aside,” Michael repeated.
Lucifer stepped forward to stand by Appolyon’s side and
looked at Michael with something between anger and sorrow.
“Well, then,” said Lucifer. “If war is what you want…” And he
drew his sword and swung.
That moment would forever be burned into Raphael’s mind.
Instead of a golden sword, the weapon that Lucifer pulled free
had already been poisoned by darkness. Black ooze had crept
up the blade and sank into the formerly pure metal to cause
it to crack and bleed from within. It was a poison of hate, of
evil; it was something that had never touched the earth before.
Raphael cried out as the blade swung, and Gabriel restrained
him with a hand thrown across his chest. Michael ducked it
easily but a few of those dark drops fell from Lucifer’s blade
and burned like acid through heaven, tearing a small hole into
the throne room and falling with the rain onto the earth below.
Bubbling and burning through the beautiful creation the LORD
had made, the evil fluid finally settled in a cavern deep within the
earth. Burning, burning, burning through heaven and earth, hell
was born that day.
Lucifer and Appolyon p