Once the other Aeons had left and Regent Azrael shut the Sanctuary doors, the King said, “You have My permission to speak, Michael.”
“Father, please, I do not wish to do this task You have set for me,” Michael pleaded.
“You do not wish to fulfil your destiny?”
“I do not wish to accept responsibility for that which I cannot hope to understand, much less control,” Michael said. “Hod is mine. I will care for it always and with all that I am, but the other Spheres belong to their own Aeons. Their ways are unknown to me. The Source intended for them to fulfil a different purpose than mine, and I fear I will only impede that.”
“No, you will provide them guidance, and, in so doing, you yourself shall grow,” said the King. “My son, you will accept this task because I have said it will be so, and you will excel at it because it is what you were meant for.”
“They will not accept my guidance,” Michael insisted. “I lack your perfection, Father, and they will resent that I have been appointed over them.”
“They will resent you if you are weak,” said the King. “It is not in your blood to be weak. If you lead them wisely, in time, they will respect and even come to fear you. It is imperative that We are united, that We together achieve the harmonious balance of a single unit. If We are separate, all will fall to chaos and destruction. I have seen their hearts and know they require a leader to unite them, to rally them to the potential they can achieve. I cannot walk among them Myself, and so it must be you.”
“Father, I beg you -”
“You will not beg!” the King roared. The light of His presence became an overwhelming onslaught in His sudden fury, forcing both Michael and Azrael to their knees. “I have declared that you speak in My name, that you act in My stead, and I will not see you demean yourself by grovelling! You will shoulder the responsibility you were born to carry and you will do so with all the grace and honour your position demands! Your Word is Glory, Michael, and you will remember that as you bear the crown I have set aside for you. Leave, now, and do as you wish with your new domain. I must commune with the Source. The plans for the beacons you are to build will be delivered to you shortly.”
“Yes, my King,” Michael murmured. He rose to his feet and exited the Sanctuary.
The return trip to Hod was uneventful and passed in a blur. There had been no elaborate farewells; Michael had avoided the other Aeons entirely, and the Kether staff did not impede him as he reunited with Mahariel and her four chosen peacekeepers. He left Kether’s palace without looking back, his gaze fixed stubbornly on the ground to block out as much of his surroundings as possible. The tall spires looming over the front gates haunted his peripheral vision no matter where he looked even long after they left the First Sphere behind.
Michael knew Mahariel was eager to speak of what had transpired during the council, but she must have recognised his mood and tactfully opted to give him time to broach the subject himself. He did not. At some point on the Path between Geburah and Hod, she tried to draw him out of his shell by telling him what she had seen while waiting in the palace of Kether: she commended the discipline of the palace guards, praised the splendour of the palace itself, and shared her observations and varied opinions of the parties brought by the other Aeons. Michael listened with half an ear; he knew Mahariel, ordinarily so sparse with her words, was doing her best to draw his mind off of what troubled him, but he couldn’t muster the will to focus on what she was saying. The last leg of the journey passed in near silence.
Night had fallen by the time they returned to Hod. The golden light of the Path kept the forest surrounding it well lit, even during the darkest hours. A cool, refreshing spring breeze carried the soft scents of new blossoms from the trees through the woods and freshly burnt firewood through the city. The soft chirping of nocturnal birds melded with the subdued, placid murmurs of a populace largely asleep. The city twinkled with thousands of lights, lamps lining the streets and bonfires in the squares that provided warmth and light even as most of the people slept. The non-existent hum of the Sephirah Hod had remained in the back of his mind the entire trip, but the Sephiroth of the other Spheres they had visited had drowned it out from a distance. Here, the others were but distant white noise and Hod was in focus, as it always had been before. So deeply glad to be home his bones ached, Michael walked towards the palace in brooding silence, his mind adrift in the turmoil of his own emotions.
They had built the palace in Hod from the ground up, stone by stone, over hundreds of seasons. Over the course of that time, various sections had repeatedly been demolished by either poor planning or various, largely avoidable, mistakes and accidents. At one point they had deconstructed the main hall in order to rebuild it in a better location relevant to where the rest of the city was unfolding. Once the sacred tree had taken root, the rest of the palace had been built around it in pieces. Michael had always been proud of the palace; it was their home that they had built themselves. It was a testament to their progress, their resourcefulness, their creativity, and it was absolutely nothing like the palace in Kether.
Now, however, freshly returned from Kether itself, Michael could see that had always been a lie. Hod’s palace had no outer perimeter of defensive walls and an altogether more sprawling layout with extensive grounds, but it shared the same white stone base, the same tall, arched doors and windows, and the vaulted ceilings. It even shared the same style of towers, though their placement was different.
Most of the palace staff had been dismissed for the night by the time they arrived, though a single sentinel was waiting in the front courtyard to watch for their return. Mahariel trotted ahead to meet the peacekeeper halfway across the entrance plaza, all traces of her earlier attempts at uncharacteristic verbosity gone.
“The palace appears to be in order, my Aeon,” she said after exchanging a few brief words with the peacekeeper. “Shall I send word to the Regent to meet you in your study?”
Michael sighed as he looked at the night sky overhead. A soothing curtain of deep blue stretched above them, hiding the Void and the other Spheres beyond it from sight. “No. It’s the middle of the night; let him sleep. We’ll speak in the morning.”
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“My Aeon,” Mahariel protested, her brow pinched.
“Goodnight, Mahariel,” Michael said before she could continue. He turned on his heel and retreated into the palace to his rooms.
He arrived in his quarters unbothered by anyone who would stall him and barred the door behind himself. He doubted he would have the fortitude to keep the door barred if anyone did, indeed, come to check on him, but he relished the feeling of clicking the lock into place. Running an anxious hand through his hair, Michael observed his quarters with a confused grimace.
In his absence, no one had turned the lights on for the night. While it was far too dark for his tastes, the tall windows lining the outer wall let in enough light from the city to allow him to see the basics. The trip to Kether had scarcely taken two days, yet now, alone in the dark, his own quarters felt foreign and cold. Michael crossed the drawing room, heading towards the door that led to his living space, and smashed his leg into one of the low tables lining the sitting area. The edge of the table shared the same curving detail that decorated the furniture in Kether. In a sudden fit of rage, Michael kicked the table over and stomped it into a dozen splintered pieces.
That helped a little, though the immediate self-degradation his tantrum sparked did not. Come morning he would have to explain why he needed his furniture replaced. Michael spun away before he could continue his rampage, muttering angrily to himself as he stomped into the back rooms, nearly ripping the door from the frame as he went.
He was two steps into his bedchamber before he came to a dead stop. He hadn’t checked the corners. Suddenly unable to breathe, he turned slowly to face the far wall. His hand went reflexively for the sword at his side, only to find nothing. He hadn’t retrieved it from Remiel yet.
The back rooms were just as dark and deathly still as the front, but there was a splash of luminescent golden in the corner next to the window, exactly the colour of fresh blood. The splatter of blood shifted ever so slightly at the sound of his entrance, and the faint radiance illuminated the outline of a face.
It took Michael a moment to regain control of his voice enough to speak. “Aeon Raphael, what are you doing here?”
Aeon Raphael unfolded herself from where she had been curled in perfect stillness in the corner, waiting for him in the darkness. “I-I am here so that we m-may speak, Michael.”
“You go too far,” Michael snapped. His heart was pounding furiously from a potent combination of fear and anger. He spared a thought to wonder why she had not turned on any lights, but then remembered it would not make any difference for her. He lit them angrily himself, every light in the room. The relief at being able to see properly once more was immediate. “If you wish to speak with me, you will send proper forewarning through the appropriate channels and never show up unannounced to my personal quarters, do you understand? How did you get in here, anyway?”
“There is a-a window,” Aeon Raphael said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world as she gestured to the open window nearest her.
Annoyed, Michael shut it and latched it. He then latched all the other windows along the wall, just for good measure. “Why are you here?” he asked. A moment later it hit him and he pressed his forehead against the window with a moan. “I said I would see you back to Tiphareth but I left you in Kether. I apologise; clearly my head has forsaken me.”
“I can f-find my way back to Tiphareth,” Aeon Raphael said. “I found m-my way here.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Why did y-you help me?” she asked softly. She appeared tiny and helpless in her blindness, jammed into the corner in an effort to make herself as small as possible. A quiet instinct whispered to him that was not entirely true.
“You needed help,” Michael said. “It was the right thing to do. I treated you no differently than I would treat anyone else under similar circumstances.”
“Th-the right thing to do,” Aeon Raphael repeated thoughtfully. “Do y-you also find me a prideful, d-defective child, Michael?”
Michael paused, his hands frozen on the final windowsill, frowning. This was a dangerous question, though she spoke lightly and kept her head tilted down in a rather convincing affectation of modesty. “I do not know you, particularly not as the King does. I would not presume to pass judgement on you without further information.” He took a deep breath, feeling reckless and frustrated, and continued speaking even as he suspected he needed to stop. “From what I have seen, I do not believe you withheld the Paths with any intention of malice. From what I have learned of Aeon Gabriel’s vision, I am confident you did not. If you have been attacked by some dark power from outside the Spheres, I’d want to help you no matter the other circumstances.”
She lurched forward as if to reach for the sound of his voice with a desperate cry of, “I-I didn’t do this to m-myself, Michael!” Immediately after, she recoiled back into the corner and pressed her hands over her eyes as if fighting a sudden, sharp headache. “I c-can’t remember what happened to me! Wh-why am I like this? Why can’t I a-answer? How do I fix this?”
“I don’t know, but I believe you,” Michael said. “I can’t answer those questions now, but if we work together with Aeon Gabriel, perhaps we can find a solution.”
Aeon Raphael went very still, her brief bout of animated distress gone in an instant. “Wh-what did she tell you?”
“You heard what she said in the council. That was more detail than she shared with me. All I’d been told was something horrible was on the horizon that must be stopped.”
“And l-look what you did with s-so few details,” Aeon Raphael whispered.
Something in her voice pricked at his agitated sense of alarm. “What does that mean?”
“I-I could help you, too,” Aeon Raphael said. “You w-want to impress but you l-lack control. Your emotions d-drive your power, a-and once it is in motion, you lose all control. I felt it each t-time you became anxious or angry, lurking b-beneath the surface. This, I-I understand. I could t-teach you how to embrace your gift, Michael, so th-that it does not control you.”
Michael removed his hands from the windowsill. The spot he had been touching was warped from the heat. The scent of Aeon Gabriel’s hands burning in his grasp hit him hard. Throughout the entire day, he had tried to convince himself that he had genuinely believed her claim that another Aeon could withstand his power. Michael had never been able to lie convincingly, not even to himself. He had known it was little more than a foolish hope from the beginning. His selfish desires had overridden his better judgement, and someone else had once again paid the price for his mistake. What would it be like to be unafraid of casual contact with another person? How would it feel to live without the constant fear that, at any moment, his volatile state could destroy everything he cared about? His better judgement was screaming at him as he turned to face Aeon Raphael, but he had to know. “May we have the good grace to help each other, then.”
In the gloom of the night, her face highlighted oddly by the unnatural glowing lines crossing her, Aeon Raphael smiled. Michael wanted to pretend it was an innocent expression of joy at the possibility of finding answers, but he could not believe that was entirely true.