Earth - 1945-2025-2067
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Before the girl, Lucifer was alone in the world. Lucifer was the only angel to fall from the host. The energy Lucifer held was dark in a way unknown to the rest of the host, and could not be rectified with them, and so was cast out. It was not a conscious decision of the host, as they had lost their consciousness in those days. It was simply cosmic biology. The host was hidden from human eyes and hands while they were unconscious, but when Lucifer was cast out, he became conscious again.
Alone, Lucifer wandered the world for many years. Lingering in dark and forgotten places, Lucifer waited for the dark energy to dissipate so that he might rejoin the host and be complete again. Places once active or important to human life but now forgotten or unused, adjacent to life but not quite a part of it -- these were the places Lucifer took refuge in. Being filled with the energy of so many lives unlived, he came as close as an angel could to feeling sadness, but occupying these spaces where his energy could resonate with that of the lives continuing on around him while he remained unseen, he felt more at equilibrium.
Then the terrible and wonderful day when Agatha came to him changed everything. When Agatha entered that dusty forgotten broom closet one June day in the human year 2025, she unwittingly entered the present resting place of Lucifer. When she pulled the door shut after her, she brushed against him, her elbow just barely grazing his outer frame.
In that instant, the dark energy Lucifer had been carrying transferred into Agatha, and with the energy of two atomic bombs and two hundred thousand unspent lives her molecules were fractured to dust so infinitesimal as to be imperceivable to humans. The transfer caused Lucifer to fold back into the host, but with him came the dust of Agatha, and the host was destabilized. As the host collapsed, the dust clung to them, and they reformed as Thrones, scattering themselves around the globe to expel the energy of Agatha’s disintegration. As they collapsed and reformed, the dust was integrated into their being, giving them visible form, and integrating Agatha’s soul and memories into their fabric, allowing her to continue living within the host consciousness.
The transfer of power dissolved Lucifer immediately back into the host consciousness, and so as an individual he felt nothing, but as Agatha died and reawakened among the host, her immense pain and confusion was felt by all of the angels. As she perceived the host’s collected memories all at once, Agatha’s entire individual consciousness collapsed and was reformed anew, shadows of her former self intertwined with various identities constructed by the host throughout their collective life.
When Agatha came around to the present being of the host, having sifted through eons of memories, it was no relief. As her physical body had given the host a physical form, she was able to feel what happened to the individual angels in a way she gathered the rest of the host was not capable of. They did not have a concept of pain, only a desire for equilibrium and a passive sense of when that equilibrium was lost.
For forty-two years, Agatha shared consciousness with the entire host of angels around the world simultaneously, feeling their pain as mankind experimented on them, weaponized them, and commodified them, and when the angels were pushed beyond their limits as Thrones, causing them to transubstantiate, it was as though the sacraments they generated were her own blood and flesh being torn asunder. Agatha Jones personally experienced the pain of having untold trillions of gallons of blood extracted from her, the pain of having untold trillions of tons of flesh cut out and turned to dust.
Pain was not all she experienced. The angels themselves did not have human emotions, and were unfeeling in the interactions humans subjected them to, but within their collective consciousness Agatha observed and felt. More than anything, she felt hatred. She watched as entire societies collapsed as their greatest minds and leaders devoted their efforts to making selfish gains through the angels, abandoning their fellow humankind. As the very soil of the earth was being turned to dust and still no real action was taken to protect people, and all the while the country that grew out of what was once her home poured billions of dollars into efforts to reconstruct her for their own purposes, Agatha had seen enough.
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On the sixth of June, 2067, forty-two years to the day from when Agatha first touched Lucifer, she communicated with the host and called the dust that had once composed her physical form back together. Along with it came the entire host, joining itself together to comprise a facsimile of the human that was once Agatha Jones. She appeared to the researchers at the United New States of America’s National Nodal Array Administration, the organization they had created to “manage” the “nodes,” as humans had called the angels since they had first appeared as Thrones. The Administration was based in a converted shopping mall not far from the site of Agatha’s human death, which had combusted a LaserQuest in a suburb of Columbus all those years ago.
When Agatha as the Host appeared before the scientists, she greeted them with the voice of the entire host. It shattered the glass in the room, and ruptured the eardrums of the humans, and caused them to bleed behind their eyes. The voice also spoke into their minds, and they heard her despite the shortcomings of their mortal physiology. The voice sounded like her own, but amplified and echoed by a chorus of a million at every audible octave.
“Behold, you modern Nebuchadnezzars of this crumbling Babylon, the answer to your great hubris. For forty-two years I have watched folly upon folly of you and your ilk, been pained with the most horrid of your actions against my host. You believe yourselves capable of building a god from dust, but I alone have constructed myself. You believe yourselves worthy of directing that same god, but I alone shall decide what action I shall take.”
Here Agatha as the Host paused to observe the room. As she had been speaking, the very walls of the room had begun to crack, and the light fixtures were slipping from the ceiling. As for her audience, it seemed that a few of the humans had fainted, or else they were dead. Those that still stood had not dared to move an inch, though the damage to the building and lab equipment had apparently set off an alarm, which she heard echoing through the corridors beyond the laboratory.
“I have witnessed enough folly, felt enough pain. If there was ever a god before me, I say she was not as great as I. I will allow you petty freedoms over this world no longer; now I will shape the earth beneath my fingertips.”
Agatha as the Host paused again. By this point the outer surfaces of every wall and object in the room had crumbled to dust. The scientists that had withstood her full voice initially had by now all fallen to their knees. One of them almost looked like he was going to beg to be spared. As he opened his mouth, Agatha as the Host spoke again, the force of her voice tearing his open jaw from his face.
“My first act of new creation will be to raze this monument to false science from the earth. And with it you false prophets shall burn.”
The Host as Agatha displaced the energy of the host within her to spread throughout the room, leaking into the surrounding corridors, and then through it expelled some of the infinite stored energy of the angels. The room and all its contents, living and otherwise, was vaporized. The surrounding portions of the building combusted, and with the amount of proprietary research equipment integrated into the structure, the flames quickly spread throughout the building. Between the raging inferno and the suddenly created void in the core of the building, the structural integrity was lost, and other sections of the building rapidly collapsed. The fire suppression system was compromised, and many exits became blocked.
The Host as Agatha stayed in the core of the chaos, floating within the void she had created and listening to the echoing screams of the petty humans around her. When at last the screams died and she could hear the echoes of emergency sirens penetrating to the core of the large and ruined complex, she disintegrated herself once again. With the unified power of the entire host of angels, Agatha as the Host could observe the entire world at once, expanding her consciousness and subphysical form across the globe like a web. At her will, she could reintegrate into her humanoid form anywhere in the world instantaneously. This was the dawn of humanity’s reckoning.
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