My eyes burned, but there were no tears in this incorporeal body. Just a tight, deep ache in my throat as the Chain pulled me over dense forests and the true sun shone on me.
It was like a painting, this Earth, so real I could reach out and touch it, and yet such a distant memory it couldn’t possibly be real. It was only a relic, a leftover vision from the time before.
The Chain tightened around me gently, squeezing my chest like it meant to comfort me.
The sun glittered off the windows of skyscrapers in the distance, and before I knew it the forest below had vanished, giving way to towns, to sparkling blue water, to houses lit with warm light.
A faint memory tickled at me, but it was gone as the Chain ripped me through a building of glass and cement.
As I blew through one of the rooms, I saw a woman in a chair. Her face was so familiar, and a sharp stab of pain went through my heart at her expression as she looked down at the tiny baby she was holding.
Before I could peer any closer, I felt myself shift in midair, reality warping around me.
I slid onto another fragment of Chain, the links pulling me away from these old memories I had no recollection of.
I was ripped backwards, away from the hospital and the houses and trees, and into another time and place.
The leaves of Earth were painted in warm golds and rich oranges, piling up along the cracked pavement of streets. A girl with long black hair looked up at the sky, shielding her eyes against the glare of the autumn sun. The woman with the loving face was only steps behind her. “Rebecca-” she said, and then her voice was cut off, as though a pane of glass had slammed down between me and them,
My stomach flipped as the Chain reversed again, pulling in yet another incomprehensible direction.
Olive drab. Marching legs. Waving flags of red, white, and blue.
I remembered this, a little.
They were all so young, these new recruits. All the human soldiers marching down the street, their parents cheering madly for them. They thought they were going to make a difference, to give up some of their years to honorable service and come home.
There was the little girl again, an adult this time, her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun, her cheeks still full from being well-fed and happy.
I wasn’t sorry when the Chain pulled me away, far from this memory that ended in nothing but heartache and despair. But it wasn’t over yet.
Olive drab. Camouflage, netting, dark oily guns in soft, unproven hands.
The sky was no longer blue. The young soldiers, hardly more than children the longer I saw them, falling by the dozen. The last line of defense as the sky went black with ash, as the sound of Heaven’s trumpets deafened them and made blood pour from their ears, the screaming… the distant flare of red on the horizon of the mass bonfires where they burned the bodies.
They were all starving now, their cheeks gaunt. Their eyes were no longer innocent, glazed and distant as they aimed and fired at an enemy they’d never be able to kill.
The Chain pulled me upwards, away from the battlefield where we’d lost all hope. Into the sky, no longer blue but forever choked with ash and flame, and away from the stench of the burn-pits.
It was terrible to see the Earth this way, from high above. The Horsemen were riding, Conquest cutting his way ever closer, War herding the dregs of humanity with his dogs, Pestilence walking through cities and people dropping around him, and Death… he was ahead of the others with his scythe, reaping the souls that stood there like dumb sheep and stared at their doom riding them down.
It’d been hopeless, all of it.
The Chain yanked me through time again. The forts were gone, the land scorched black, and not even vultures came to circle the air over the killing fields.
The angels descended with a brilliance that cut through the destruction and illuminated how terrible it had been. I watched Gabriel stoop over a woman’s body, peer into her face… and smile as he pulled her silent, numb soul forward and into a new shell.
The new angel blinked at him, her black hair like pitch against the snowy white of her new wings.
“Don’t-” I tried to whisper, but my mouth wouldn’t work. The Chain kept my words bound inside my throat; this was the past, a place where I couldn’t interfere.
He took the angel’s hand and flew upwards, and the Chain dragged me after them.
Somewhere in the back of my dazed mind, I wondered if it would skip away from the history I knew and show me the past I hadn’t been alive for… the cursed slice of time when God was killed.
For a moment I thought I’d gotten my wish; there was no sign of myself or Gabriel, and the gleaming gold and ivory towers of Heaven were nothing compared to the tower in the center. The throne room of God.
I held my breath, waiting for the horrible moment when Gabriel had ensured humanity’s destruction.
But I saw nothing except chains. Golden chains spiraling from the tower in every direction, connected to everything… and then I was falling again.
Downwards, another steep plummet like my fall, the wind whipping tears into my eyes and my hair behind me like a comet.
I forced myself to keep them open as we plummeted back to Hell, the wastelands rising up to greet me, but before we hit the sand the Chain leveled off. I felt myself jerked away from Dis again.
Over the Fields of Asphodel. Over barren lands and dark seas, into places where nothing grew and even the sun seemed burned black.
But there was a light despite the darkness. A thin golden thread, no more than a filament, stretching ahead of me.
I forced myself to look down, and saw it was connected to me, growing from the dark mate mark over my chest. Two others extended from my palm and wrist, one a brilliant silver and the other deep scarlet. I was sure if I could see my back, there would be a glowing violet line as well, leading far back to Azazel.
Wherever they were… the Chain was pulling me along so fast I could barely make out where I was in the darkness, relying only on the sense of the links around me to hold me in place. They were an anchor in this endless dark.
And then the sun returned, pale and faded. The land opened up beneath me, revealing the high, sharp peaks of a mountain range like jagged teeth against a gray sky.
Ash rained down softly, landing on the rocks in large flakes and covering everything like snow. I held onto the thin golden chain like a lifeline, refusing to let go even for an instant. It led deeper into this terrible place.
The mountains dipped down into valleys so steep I couldn’t see the bottoms, only endless chasms. The Chain pulled me over several withered trees sticking up from the soil like skeletons, and then I saw it.
It took my breath away in fear, my body clenching up tight even though I wasn’t technically real at the moment, only a specter of myself.
Still, I couldn’t stop all of my senses from clamoring in terror, because I had no weapon, and he was here.
It was the Dragon, stretched out in a valley far below. He was so enormous that he made the chasms look small, his putrid scarlet and green flesh squeezed down into one of the voids. His wings were curled up tight against his back, and several of his heads appeared to be sleeping, their eyelids tightly shut.
One of them was perched on a rocky outcropping, rancid steam spiraling from his nostrils. But the golden chain I held… it led down there.
For the first time, I was afraid to go after one of my men. The creature that had tried to take everything was there, only yards away.