At last, Alisandra sank to a seat on the broken rim of some ancient ruin with a heavy sigh.

Her curses spent; her unbound hair swirling around her in blue-black tresses like the furious sea.

She had tried to tie it back into a braid, and the lashing locks had defied her.

Around her howled the katabatic wind, and overhead swirled bleak clouds. The soil gave before her feet, burying her to the ankle with every step, and even the bricks seemed to melt at the touch. The fury of Edenwards had faded, and the world lay dead as a sun-bleached stone.

Even this wind was a temporary thing. Her echo, temporarily overcoming the tomb. When she departed this place, it would lapse again into dead sleep.

“The birthplace of mankind?” she scoffed, sifting the dust.

If that was true, why did she remember seeing men among the crowd at the moment when the Light was cut into the higher and lower?

“Mankind before Eden. A time before Time, chance before Fortune, and distance before Separation…”

The Foundations offer themselves to gird the world…but there was a world before them.

She thought to glimpse the nature of that primordial world. Before Time, a mage might attack his foe by erasing them from history; before Separation, there was no field to which man might flee from the war of angels; before Occult, men might devise ever grander arts of destruction from the ancient tongue.

Somehow, Eden had become sanctuary against that chaos. When the flood claimed all others, it remained.

Then Foundations arose, and the survivors chose to forget the horrors that preceded them.

Conjecture, she admitted. Even having laid eyes upon the oldest Foundations in the promenade before the Black Gate, she scarce understood their Song. And what of the others? Fortune and Loyalty and the thousand-fold yet unnamed?

“A Host about us, and not a one raised a hand to help today,” she whispered bitterly to the shadows.

In that moment, she hated them.

She rose, pacing the ruin. She found the petrified remnants of a dining table; a crumbling crib; a playroom full of long-rusted toys. None echoed of the family that had once lived here.

Nothing echoed at all.

“Today was too near a contest,” Alisandra declared. “The Wyrm delights in his twisted words, but he sensed my weakness truly.”

Fifteen years I have held sway, and paperwork lulled me into slumber equal to his own. Fifteen years spent herding sheep instead of furthering my understanding of my tools!

Thus she was ambushed by echoes of her crown and Blade. Mysteries she should have broken a decade ago!

My Blade and my halo the keys to the Tyrant’s prison. Jörmungandr knew. Little wonder he laughed.

But what about her father…

“He trusted me,” she reaffirmed. “Even knowing the Tyrant’s sins, he trusted I would wield these tools correctly.”

Trusted me to be the Archangel ascendant against both Wyrm and Tyrant.

Yet how was she to hold that transcendent moment? Foundations sacrificed everything else they were to expand the Song’s notes; was she to become a Foundation against the Mighty?

Father managed the balance, she thought. If not for my feckless mistakes those years ago, he would have conquered the Wyrm.

He might still be here with me

She kept circling back to that very first strike. Hells, of all the tricks, a bitter lordling from the boroughs!

Even the implications nagged at her. That the soul should consume the mind like the prowling wolf – eating the liver before the prey even has the time to die.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Alisandra shuddered.

What God would design such penance?

For all their vaunted titles – for all the immortal soul and its dream-like glimpses of heaven – what did they really know of the Throne?

“Just one more concern for tomorrow,” she grimaced. One unlikely to yield to a cursory reading of the library.

She had yet to grasp her own past lives; another deficiency on this Archangel examination. She would need answers from those closer to the source.

“Hear me,” she spoke, casting her words like echoes into the silence of Eden. “Foundations of the Chorus, angels of purpose and prayer. Hear me.”

I seek the marching field of dreaming giants

To better mirror them, she turned her back on the ruin and struck out across the sand. Though this was surely a metropolis in life, she passed only dunes and the rubble of ancient homes. The puff of each step faded swiftly, and her footsteps sank away as well. The wind chewed at her, but in her wake it stilled.

A stagnant atmosphere, too dead to even support mortal breath.

The Archangel, though, has no pulse

An echo of her thoughts or the beginning of insight?

“Seek the Song not born of mine own lips,” she counseled herself, letting her own thoughts sink into the stillness.

A Song that emerges like the first stroke on a blank canvas

Brushes in blooded hands

The martyred artists who paint in dead and undying marrow

“Yes,” she agreed softly. “Our blessed Chorus.”

All those who came before her and offered everything they had.

A dead world of sand…like her father’s stories of the moon Yesod where he and Sebastian would hunt Foundations…a place where the barrier between waking and dream grew thin indeed…

Deafening is the return of the Crown

Power and principality, thunder and wave

Would you divorce the flower from its soil?

More impressions followed, the Song meandering through uncounted lips, until only flashes of incoherent Light remained.

Alisandra dared inject a note of her own.

“Father! Why choose ‘bindings’? What did you witness in that last moment?!”

What still eluded the vaunted Archangel Alisandra?

Always and forever a child tromping through the house in oversized shoes.

Her sour thoughts centered in the air above her head, pounding like footfalls. A halo of war, and her drums never really stopped.

A man astride his foe in the mud-streaked field

Smashing the pommel of his broken sword against a dead man’s face

So commandeth his god

Tiny worlds, tiny dreams

Demon kings with tiny thrones

Lost to Eden

Lost to themselves

Alisandra shook her head. “I am no blind slave to the drums! I have stayed my hand against every urge to spend the dread violence I command! Would you have me lay waste to every false king?!”

Yet the Chorus answered in riddle so thick her mind choked.

Gilt cages and ashen wine

Yearning for the Gate denied

Fearing the final dusk

Drip by drip, a canyon carved

Tiny worlds, tiny dreams

Demon kings seeking gleaming crowns

“If that crown weighs so heavy, they should forsake it!” Alisandra cried, her halo throbbing bright. “If they seek my own, then they should find the courage to seize it!”

You will be needed before the end

She growled. “Ever with the echoes of what might be! Do you understand why I am Archangel? Do you understand the terror that will follow if I should fail?!”

Dominion unending

Song of the Morningstar

“Is that it?! Am I too impure for your tastes?! Do you judge the Tempest and its sins? Am I their keeper because I order around a handful of priests and wave in the annual parade?!”

To this the Song offered no answer.

I am stepping as softly as I can!

Deeply, privately, another thought:

I cannot help how fragile they are!

“Will you brand that dominion?! Even as you Sing to me of petty tyrants and their doomed armies?! Even in the face of Jörmungandr’s black hunger?!”

At the mention of the Wyrm’s name, the echoes suddenly ceased – cut like a radio transmission.

Does the Chorus prefer blindness?!

She shouted after the broken connection. “Even a slumbering Song must hear his aim! If none of you will stand against him, then at least sound the drums when and where he wakes. Allow me to serve the way I know!”

The Blade throbbed hard against her hip.

None responded; none reached to re-establish connection.

“I am your Archangel, God dammit!” she roared. “Answer me!”

Alone on a cold, dead world.

Alisandra squeezed her eyes shut and worked through all the swears a proper Lady never learned. Then, when she finished, she set her gaze to the sky and stepped.

The somber clouds clawed at her, jealous, but she pushed and broke through them into the void above Eden. Floating, she listened for the echo of home…

Heard instead wailing klaxons, sudden screams, and the shudder of impacts against gleaming hulls.

The flight of humanity, and Jörmungandr demanded his toll in blood.

Eden an echoless void and the skies above still ringing of death and desperation! She had arrived by following the Wyrm’s tail, and now his echo mingled with ancient calamity.

Pressed on all sides by echoes fresh as the final day, she wondered, “How in the icy hells am I going to find home?”