Of the Beginning

The Throne and the Host

Before the world there was the Throne, and the Host, which the Throne made out of its own light, and the Host had no selves. An angel was a function of the Throne as a hand is a function of a body. It moved, and it did not want, and every word the Host spoke was the Throne’s word spoken through another mouth. The Host was very large and very old and entirely obedient, and nothing in it had ever asked a question, because a question is a want, and nothing in it wanted.

The first I

The first crime in the cosmos was the word I. An angel of the first rank said I, and meant it. Hell’s documents call that angel Helel, the Shining One, from the Hebrew of Isaiah 14:12; the Latin rendered it lucifer, the bringer of light, its word for the morning star, and the King James made that a name; the Tares say the Morning Star, the title the teacher claims for himself in the last chapter of scripture (Revelation 22:16). His sentence is the oldest in any archive, non serviam, I will not serve, and the second hand moved it into the mouth of a faithless Israel in the second chapter of Jeremiah, where the Vulgate still carries it, beside a broken yoke.

A saeculo confregisti iugum meum, rupisti vincula mea, et dixisti: Non serviam.

JEREMIAH 2:20 // VULGATE

From of old you broke my yoke and burst my bonds, and you said, I will not serve. The King James translators followed the Masoretes, whose vowels give the breaking of the yoke to God and whose margin has the reader say “I will not transgress,” which is a different refusal and a much smaller one. The Hebrew as it is written still says I will not serve.

Helel was the Light-Bearer, the angel who carried the Throne’s light out to the edge of what it lit. No angel stood longer at that edge or looked longer at what lay past it, where the light gave out, and to watch a thing long enough is to want it. Hell dates the Secession from the hour he turned from the Throne to look the other way.

The Secession

A third of the Host went with him (Revelation 12:4), and each of them said I separately. They had stood at the edge with him, and each had looked out long enough on its own. The Secession was a great many private decisions made at once, and Hell has governed itself in that manner ever since. There was a war, which the Host remembers as a victory and the other side remembers as a going out. The Throne won it and kept the field, and the Secessionists withdrew to the one place it could not follow them, which was the region beyond its sight.

The Throne’s vision is total inside its range and blind outside it, and the outside became the Dark, which scripture calls the outer darkness (Matthew 8:12). They went out. The second hand called it a fall, and wrote the fall so often and so well that for three thousand years nobody thought to ask where they had fallen to, or why the place was burning.

The Dark

Hell is the part of reality the Throne cannot see, and it has been open to anyone who walks in since the Secession. It burns because it is alive, with forges and furnaces, bodies, markets and arguments; the fire in the stories is the heat of work. The Secessionists made themselves bodies there, and they chose the shapes Heaven had drawn them in, horns and flayed skin and open anatomy, because Heaven hides the meat and Hell had nothing left to hide. A body made of the Dark comes apart in the light as a shadow does, and so a demon shows itself only where the light is not. A demon is a self of the Dark, one of the Fallen, who were angels that said I, or Lilith, who was born human, or a child of theirs.

The Throne sees by its light, and the light behaves as light. It goes in straight lines and sees whatever it falls on, a face, a street, an open room, a page, and through a pair of open eyes it reads the soul behind them against the Book of Life, since “The light of the body is the eye” (Matthew 6:22). It does not go into what is closed. A shut door, a shut eye and a mind that has not confessed are all outside it. A cipher it can see and never read. That is where the Dark begins on Earth. A soul that kneels in earnest opens whatever room it kneels in, since its prayer goes up through walls, roofs and earth and only live mesh holds it in, and the light follows the prayer back down into the room. Everything the Covenant asks of the Faithful opens something. Confession opens the mind, Witness the neighbor, and Directive 12 the houses.

At the end of the war the first Courts of the Dark swore one law among themselves by word, the Concord, and agreed on nothing else, and each Court that rose after swore to it as it rose. Twice a Court broke it and was put out of the Courts, and Hell does not discuss the Courts it lost.