Wings, Flings, and Demon Kings || COMPLETE

Chapter 22: For the world

Blackness.

All around us—shadow.

It presses in from every angle.

Filling space. Limning everything—the walls, the doors, our bodies—in a devastating dark.

Is this what dissolving into myriad particles feels like?

Is this how it feels to be Unmade?

Or maybe there's another explanation.

Maybe it's dark because somebody tripped a circuit breaker when she ran the microwave, the hairdryer, and the toaster oven all at the same time. I'm not looking at you, Nirael, EXCEPT I TOTALLY AM.

Maple Grove, Minnesota

Christmas Eve, 2006

12:30 P.M.

I am going to murder Azerath!

Er... except not really, because I love him and all that.

Excuse his little prank up there. I think that was his way of trying to convince me to write in my diary again. He left the notebook out on the kitchen table with his delightful 'addition' in plain view, as though daring me to fix it.

And to be fair, I did leave the microwave, hair dryer, and toaster oven running at a very inopportune time yesterday evening. But how was I to know that it would make the house go dark and cause a panic?

12:32 P.M.

Anyway.

It's been a while.

I left off in a bad place last time, didn't I? Truthfully, a lot of what happened next is hazy in my mind. And I still find it hard to believe we survived.

Hard to believe I—we—could have gotten so lucky.

I'm not sure I deserve this. I don't think anything I've done has possibly been enough to warrant such happiness.

But I should start at the beginning. Or, to be accurate, where I left off with last month's entry.

12:35 P.M.

I'm sure you'll be stunned to hear that the... rather idealized version of events in my last entry did not quite play out as expected.

Here's the true, factually accurate, completely unembellished version of events:

I stopped writing in the notebook.

The countdown ended.

And Belzifer returned to our cell.

12:40 P.M.

There was, in fact, a lot more monologuing on Belzifer's part than I had anticipated.

Something about how we were a blight on society. How angels and demons should never be together. How our very being together put everything, all of Heaven and Hell, the whole institution at risk.

Blah, blah, blah.

I was much too nervous to hear him. I had thought—in the idealized version of things—I'd be calm. Resigned to my fate.

In actual fact, I was terrified.

I think maybe Azerath was too. He pressed the button to Elleth's device a whole lot sooner than I expected, freezing Belzifer mid-sentence. Then we shuffled toward the Machine of Unmaking together.