Angel Fall

Laurelai was lost to the world, almost as soon as the contractions started in earnest. The succubus’s magic turned those agonizing moments into orgasms almost instantly, and the angel was a babbling an incoherent mess as she drifted on a sea of ecstasy. This wasn’t the way that childbirth was supposed to happen. She understood that, but then she was never supposed to have a child. She was supposed to be an incorruptible instrument of the divine, and instead she was about to become a mother. Even with all the depravity and pleasure she’d endured up until this point, these inverted sensations were an order of magnitude more extreme, and they kept her from properly considering the implications of what was happening to her.  

Only the goddess and mortal women should have been capable of such a miracle, and yet because of the dark sorceries that the demons had woven into her formally male body, she was panting and gasping as new life prepared to force itself out of her body. She was helpless, and both she and her unborn child were completely in the succubus’s care now. Fortunately, that care came with conditions. Lilliamma would give the angel and her child undying loyalty for the next 48 hours, and then Laurelai would let the demoness feast on the lust of the followers to her heart's content for the rest of the week while they both decided what came next. She couldn’t kill them of course, but Liliamma hadn’t complained too much about that.

“I only kill my partners by accident,” she purred, Stroking Laurelai’s pregnant belly. “And I’m anxious to see just what will happen to you next. First you escape Lord Bel, then from hell itself, and now you find yourself amongst holy men and women. This is more entertainment than I’ve had in decades my pet.”

All that was in the past now. The demoness was handling the birth of her child, and all she had to endure the tidal waves of ecstasy that threatened to swamp her soul and drive her mad. 

There was something past the pleasure though. If she was being tossed about on an ocean of transcendent bliss, then there was a strange land on the far side of that ocean, and whether she wanted to or not, she was going to reach it. 

When she stepped on the shore of the foreign land though, it was a lush, tropical paradise that seemed strangely familiar to her. Fruits hung heavily on trees and a gentle sea breeze offset the scorching heat of the sun, as the wave that had brought her here subsided and slowly retreated behind her. Laurelai turned to look at the sea, but it was gone now. It was a flat, bone-dry desert that had never seen a drop of water. She recognized that too, but she couldn’t quite recall where it was from. 

Straining her eyes to the horizon she could see a dark clouds on the horizon. No - they weren’t clouds, she realized, but a wall. A huge one, that reached towards the sky. She wasn’t sure if it had been built to keep something out or to keep something in, but instinctually she turned away and began to walk further into the verdant oasis that was her own private paradise. 

When she started walking it had seemed to be only a tiny desert island, but the deeper she continued, the thicker the jungle got. She would have become entirely lost in this dreamy place had she not noticed that the mountains rising in front of her weren’t mountains at all but an ancient and overgrown alabaster step pyramid of the purest white. 

Laurelai flexed her wings, preparing to take to the sky to get a better look, but she couldn’t fly. She lacked the strength somehow. Was that part of the message, or simply because she was so physically drained from the birthing, she wondered. She had no idea, but she knew this place was trying to tell her something, and so she walked to the base of the pyramid and started to climb. 

From the very top she could only see her paradise stretching in every direction once more. The dead salt flats that she knew she should still be able to see were absent, and the only things to break up the tree cover were the alabaster ruins and the occasional river. 

Laurelai scanned the horizon in all directions circling slowly to the right, until she’d seen everything the world had to show her, but nothing stood out until she came full circle and found an angel standing there with his sword to her throat. 

“I haven’t found you yet, but I will,” he rasped as she realized who the strong man was. This was the angel that she had raped at the monastery. “It’s your fault too. I can’t get you out of my mind.”

“You have to understand—” she pleaded.

The angel interrupted, her though. “No. No I don't. You’re the only one who has to understand. Only you know what comes next.”

“I don’t understand, what comes next?” she asked. 

The angel’s only response was to pull the tip of his long sword away from her throat and point with it. She followed its gaze with her eyes, and there she found the end of the world.

The entire horizon was taken up with armies of demons fighting armies of humans while angels danced overhead, as they struck and struck again. The places that these armies battled for had long since been reduced to ash, and the level of death and corruption that existed had practically eliminated the boundaries between hell and creation. It was plain in the glowing cracks and the infernal greenish balefire that jetted out from the lowest level of the pit.  

The sights were a thousand times worse than any incursion she’d ever fought against before, and she truly knew this was the end of days. 

“Did I do this?” she whispered. “Is this my fault?”

“This is not about what you did, but what you didn’t do,” an unfamiliar woman’s voice rang out. “Lord Bel’s plan is too far advanced to be stopped, but when the world needed you, you were too busy repenting to save it.”

Laurelai whirled around to see who was speaking so hardly, and found a short haired, severe looking woman in battered silver armor who she was sure she’d never met before. 

“Why shouldn’t I repent?” Laurelai asked, her heart heavy with regret as she thought about all the terrible sexual acts she’d done. “I’ve done so much evil…”

“You have procreated. You have done something that heaven has forgotten: you have made more soldiers for the fight against evil,” she answered. Her words were neutral, but her tone was damning. “Given a thousand years that would be enough, but you have less than one, you must—”

“You must give up this foolish resistance,” a third voice answered, spinning her around again as he placed his heavy hand on her shoulder. “Creation is lost. You are lost. All you can do it surrender and reign in hell by my side.”

“You mustn’t,” the angel called out, “Never give in. There is a way!”

Laurelai was as surrounded by the people on all three sides of her as she was by the ghosts of her sins and of her doubts. The world felt like it was spinning, and see was trapped between an angel, a human, and a demon lord. The background behind each of them changed as she turned, confused and helpless. Behind Bel was the battleground of Armageddon, behind the angel was the endless salt flats ringed by that terrible wall, and behind the woman there was the verdant jungle that she’d been standing in before this conversation started. 

“Where is this place,” she asked, turning to the angel finally. The other two locations Laurelai understood, or at least she felt like she did. 

“I thought you were an angel still, even in this fallen state,” he sneered, “That is what you told me. How could any true angel fail to recognize perdition?”

As soon as the haughty angel said the word she instantly knew it to be true as she shook free of the fuzzy dream logic that trapped her here. Perdition. That wall was the edge of the world then. She remembered now. It was separated creation from the time before… from the nowhere that existed before the goddess had birthed the world and filled it with life. 

“Then that means,” Laurelai said, pivoting to the woman, “that this is paradise?”

“It is,” the knight said solemnly. “You stand at the first temple, created in the time before time. It was old before the world was young.”

“Why is it so overgrown then?” Laurelai asked. 

“Because time flows different here,” she answered. “The goddess expelled man from the garden after their refusal to cease sinning only  a thousand years ago, but here eons have passed unanswered. In time nature will devour everything.”

“Is that what I must do then?” Laurelai implored the woman, grasping her rough callused hands in her own soft ones. “Is the thing I need to save the world from damnation here?”

“The only thing that can save the world is here,” Lord Bel said, reaching around and grabbing her by her bare midriff, “But instead it will be used to destroy it and build a new one with all the visceral reality that the goddesses flawed creation lacks!”

As the demon turned her back to face the end of days. This time the battle ended though, and she could see a world that had been changed forever. Man still lived, but it was a barren and blasted place not so different from the layer of hell she’d escaped, and the survivors were ruled over by demon lords that continued to war against each other, even in victory. 

“There is no escaping this,” he growled in her ear even as she pushed him away. “All of creation will fall before me and you will be mine once more!”

“Not if I leave creation!” she shouted as she retreated backwards towards the other two people. She knew that they weren’t her allies either of course. Not yet at least. But now she understood. There was no time left. Not in the world of men, but outside it - outside there was all the time one could ever ask for. If she could yet bring a small army outside the bounds of creation, she could turn it into a large one, and turn the large one into a gigantic one. She could turn the tide, and as that understand firmed her resolve, she saw a look of fear flicker across Lord Bel’s face. 

Even as all the pieces began to fit in place, the distant sounds of a crying infant were enough to disrupt the strange dream world they were in, and make in around her crumble beneath the only reality that mattered: she was a mother now. The timeless pyramid at the heart of paradise shattered, and she hung there in the timeless void just long enough to see the world crumble away. Then she awoke to the feeling of a cloth wrapped bundle being pressed into her arms. 

“Your child is healthy,” Liliamma said soothingly, “What will you name them?”

Laurelai looked down at the squalling, blood smeared face of her infant child, and was struck by the beauty of the moment. Seeing the crying baby moved her in ways she had never expected, and couldn’t possibly begin to express. 

The baby didn’t have the deep red skin of her father, but neither did she half Laurali’s pale flesh. Instead, she had skin the color of lilacs and a few wisps of raven black hair that did nothing to hide the tiny ivory buds on her forehead that would one day become horns. There were feathers too. Dark ones like her mother had on her back and upper arms, though she did not know if her child would grow more than vestigial wings once they got older. 

“Hope,” Laurelai whispered. “I will name them hope.”

Author's Note: So, I have finally restarted this story. I'm sorry it's taken so long, I haven't been feeling very well lately, and school absolutely crushed me in May. Currently I plan to release new chapters every couple weeks, but since it is summer, things might start to pick up speed once everything calms down. We will see! Enjoy!