Up on a stage, before a small uproarious crowd of sixty or seventy thousand a band of four played their hearts, while an illusory vision of passion and color played out in the background. Displaying bright explosions of color and warm gloom that rose and fell matching the pace of the song.

*****

Wanderers and tricksters were the third most common amongst the gods and immortals. Likewise, the number of factions and groups that were made up solely by their ilk were the third most numerous in the heavenly plane.

The biggest of these groups was known as the Hermes club, also known as the Traveler’s league, it was made up of messengers, spies, merchants,  assassins and Musicians.

*****

Jermaine stood at the back of the band, holding the double duty of manning the keyboard and controlling the illusory light show.

After several decades working their way up the ranks as barroom room troubadours, engineers of brothel ambience and roadside players, they’d finally started getting hired as the opening act for some relatively major events.

Billy’s connection was only enough to get them a place on the Herme’s club. Gaining status as musicians was left entirely to them. Looking back Jermaine still had no clue whether he was amused or bemused by the fact he’d spent the last five hundred years establishing a presence in the heavenly plane’s musical industry.

On the one hand, he couldn’t help feeling that everything he’d spent that the last few hundred years had been spent slightly more trivially than what he was used to. There was a part of him, that wished that he could have just worked with Maynard, Darlene and the fifty man cell of the thousand ghosts that were working with the two, helping them set up a Heavenly Super Space branch of the Bone Tree Company.

It would have doubtlessly been better for his esteem than using up entire decades just for the sake of kissing up to nightclub owners. Or spending centuries, pandering to some record mogul’s third cousin just for the sake of getting party invites.

It would have been less tedious than going out drinking every night, and lurking in various hotspots for the sake of possibly running into someone worth knowing.

On paper it all sounded managing and playing in a rock band quite trivial compared to their usual fare, but heaven help him if it wasn’t some of the hardest work he’d ever had to do.

Then again...on the other hand, there was no denying that he was suited for the work. Having once sought a career in showbiz before deciding it might be a tad easier to set up an influential company of mercenaries instead.

The thing that really tipped the scales for Jermaine’s like and dislike of his newly found career in the music industry was his infinite amusement with the revelation that the company’s resident agent actually sang as like an angel. His dulcet croonings belying his gruff, rebel prince, wandering swordsman, mien.  

In recent days the fallen angel’s killer edge had been somewhat smoothed down of late. He no longer gave off the impression that he was just waiting for a sufficient reason to cut the world in two.  The little lady who stood at the man’s back had a lot to do with that. Bright eyed, with hair the color of blue-steel, after five hundred years of cultivation and growth, she now looked just barely old enough to mistaken as the man’s little sister. When she’d first appeared, Jermaine, Matthew and the rest had spent a good amount of time joking that she could have easily been the fallen angel’s daughter.

In reality, little Annais was the man’s sword, which had turned out to be the man’s dearly departed wife. Reborn and re-growing as absorbed celestial energy and life’s blood of the angel’s foes.

Jermaine could vaguely remember Ell having mentioned it to him while they were talking shop over lunch. If that was so, he could only suppose that he either hadn’t taken Ell’s words very seriously, or he’d completely forgotten them.

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Once he actually had the opportunity to give it some more serious thought, he found that he didn’t know what to think over it. Was it so strange that a man who knew how raise an army of true celestials, true, full immortals, could also raise the dead? While he wasn’t an expert on these sort of things, by his reckoning,both feats were equally impossible.

Thus the only other thought he gave the issue, was a feeling of calculation as he wondered if Billy had any way for them to make his miraculous, resurrection of the dead into a marketable service.

*****

The Band named “Ghosts of Asphodel” played through a set of five songs, moving back and forth through a spectrum, of romantic ballads, rock, and somber songs about the life of a martial warrior.

So long as there was no one important around who might quote him later, Jermaine would freely admit that they weren’t his best work. What they “were” was catchy as hell, with the songs’ syncopated beats and infectious cadence accelerating the group's rise in the musical world.

Once the band reached their sixth song of the evening, a group ten individuals in hooded cloaks began to clamber onto the stage.

They all bore axes that were just as impressive as the one that the band’s resident angel had taken up in place of his sword. Though theirs were unfortunately not of the musical variety.

As the sixth song hit its third chorus the newcomers charged towards the center of the stage.

Jermaine clucked his tongue as he saw what was going down.

“Shit, guys, you couldn’t wait till the seventh set?” he grumbled to himself. He looked up from his keyboard and gave the crowd a wide smile, giving a silent cue to the rest of the band members that they should do the same.

Matthew wore a goofy grin as he continued to smack the drums. Any idiot could keep a simple beat, but it took true artiste to smoothly and cleanly alter a complex one.

Matthew was apparently one of those artiste slowly altering the tempo as they cut the sixth song short. Beads of sweat rising on his brow as he shifted from the slower paced cadence of their sixth song into the mile-a-minute pacing of their seventh song. The cymbals crying out, making the listeners souls go shivery.

With the exception of their drummer, the rest of the band fell quiet taking advantage of lull within the seventh songs composition, then out from off the stage, came the tense and fast flying notes of four stringed violin.

Matthew’s wife-to-be walked on stage and as her frenetic solo reached its plateau the rest of the instruments joined in. Starting from left to right, with Annais’ bass, Angelo’s guitar and Jermaine’s keyboard.

It was just as their sounds were about to gel together that the interlopers struck, rushing the band as they continued to play. Their fingers fly over their instruments as they met with their guests.

Angelo and Anais played back to back, the sounds of his guitar and her bass melding and playing off of each other, echoing throughout the hall. They moved across the stage, with the young woman tumbling over Angelo’s back, her feet meeting the face of two of their unwanted guests.

Angelo’s wings flared out in a flash of blinding gray and white light, the cloud of feathers absorbing the energy beams that one of the interlopers had tried to spit at them.

The girl jumped between the angels wings and he took her by the hand, swinging her round over his head. For brief half second span there was an illusion that woman had become a blade a brilliant line of infinitesimal thinness, dividing all that entered its reach.

The song picked up as more and more interlopers climbed onto the stage.

Eyes closed, her chin resting on her violin, Cindy paced across the center of the stage. The plume of flame that she’d summoned causing the crowds younger crowd to oh and ah.

As the number of attackers continued to rise Jermaine and Matthew did there part as well. Pits and geysers of shadow swallowed up the strangers, while the illusionary beasts in the background peeled themselves from the wall and gorged themselves on immortal flesh.

For the next five minutes the concert entered a strange realm where the singing was punctuated by almost musical screams and the splashes of quick shifting color were accompanied with explosion of red blood and black ash.

The two guitarists danced amidst the hooded crowd, severing limbs and sundering bodies, reducing, the strangers into flesh confetti. Jumping about like the song had taken hold of them and refused to let go.

Then finally Angelo returned to his microphone  stand and screamed the last lyric of the songs into the microphone. The song reached his end and he ended their small concert with a customary:

“Woo, Thank you New Avalon, you’ve been fucking wonderful.”

The crowd went wild, stomping their feet, clapping their hands and hollering till their voices started to go hoarse. The band’s members all took a bow, as the illusions faded away and the overhead lights started to dim.  

The curtains dropped and Jermaine sighed, in relief, feeling a cool bead sweat travel down from his brow to his jaw. Here in the heavenly planes, the phrase “battle of the bands” was meant more literally than he would like.

Bards fought and died for the sake of monopolizing the affections of the gods, demons and celestials that called the heavenly plane home. Attaining eternal glory became an even bigger deal when one could hypothetically live forever to enjoy it. 

Even knowing this, Jermaine couldn’t help hearing parts of his brain whirring into action as they started to work on when and where their next show would be.

“This fucking job, eh?” said a grinning Matthew. Voicing the thoughts that had been going through Jermaine’s own head.