“The rest of you will be returned to Pandora. You shall continue your duties as the inmates are returned. Thank you one and all for your continued service." Raphael waved lazily, and those guards who had remained sitting, instantly and without a sound, vanished from the room. The auditorium had been quiet before, but now it stood far too empty for its size. The mannequin-esq stillness of those who had remained made me hesitate to move myself, and the weight of the false peace in the room had me convinced that if I dared to open my mouth to speak, the crushing silence would break me in order to maintain itself.

  “I imagine many will request judgement in the coming days,” Raphael muttered, and if it hadn’t been for the soundless void he shattered, we may not have heard him. A beat later Rapheal sat back down on his reappearing stool, looked up at us all and continued in a louder voice. “Those of you further up should come down and join us.”

  Rather than moving straight away we collectively decided it would be best if we stood rooted to the spot where we were. Also, as a group, we chose to cast looks at each other trying to decide if he was talking to us. All except Maisie, that is. She’d made it halfway down the auditorium steps before the rest of us even registered what the archangel had said. I was beginning to think she volunteered for a pseudo-suicide mission two to three times a week, and things were progressing perfectly normally so far.

  I followed, and took a seat in the front row with the rest. I was the last to sit, and a gentle murmur had sprung up along the row. I ignored them and closed my eyes. I felt cold. I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t tired. I didn’t feel like I sometimes do with a group of people I don’t know well, surrounded and awkward, nor did I feel a desire to be alone. I hadn’t really registered what I’d just volunteered for and yet there was something surrounding me, encompassing me. It was enclosing around me, and squeezing, slowing gearing up to begin its final crush. I gave myself a shake and pulled my mind back to what my new reality was. My thoughts, however, were not allowing themselves off their train toward fantasies containing a grisly fate at the hands of a faceless monster that I’d been trying to sneak up on with a giant butterfly net. As my chest tightened and my breathing became a challenge, I forced my eyes open, and then to function, and when I looked up to try and find something to distract me… I found Raphael staring down at me. The front row was beneath his eyeline, so this time he was looking down. Directly at me. Could his gaze be what I was feeling? He did not blink nor break the gaze, and it didn’t even cross my mind to look away. His eyes were near a perfect black, with just a faint ring of nebula coloured sclera around the edges. They were extraordinary, and familiar.

  When I was eleven, myself and some of the kids at my school went on a camping trip. It was one of those excuses to get us outside and interacting with nature. One night, we set up our tents not too far from the edge of a large lake. The teachers told us not to go anywhere near the water after we’d settled down for the evening. So of course, in the way of children who had been told there was one thing they couldn’t do*, we waited for the teachers to fall asleep and then we all silently ran for the nearest rise and dared each other to jump the twenty or so feet into the lake below. No one did it. Everyone who went to the lip of the rise looked down, and then chickened out. I’d laughed at them with the others, until it was my turn. I swaggered up to the precipice and looked down at the face of the lake. We could just about make out the ground around us in the scant moonlight, and the edge I stood on could only just be seen, but as I reached the sheer drop and looked down, I couldn’t see the water for what it was. The moon reflected off it like an ethereal mirror, and the scattering of stars in the sky were so clear they could have been floating Christmas lights. It takes an adjustment of the mind to see a mirror, and not the reflections. Had there been ripples or an ebb and flow, it might’ve seemed less like the infinite crushing emptiness of the cosmos, but mother nature was as asleep as we were not.

  *See report: Eve in the garden

  It could’ve been twenty feet down, or two hundred, and I had no idea how deep the waters went. We were old enough to agree that stories of monsters were silly, but not old enough to stop believing in them. The sheer blackness of the water’s depths left no question that it went down forever. To the centre of the Earth and beyond. My mind had just begun working out how I could back down while saving face in front of the others, when one of the teacher’s voices rang out and we all began to run back to the tents. I remember lying awake that night thinking about what could be hidden in the depths of such waters, and about the never-ending darkness that would surround me should I find myself at the bottom. I saw that same infinite pool when I met Raphael’s eyes up close. Eyes that saw the beginnings of the universe, and that would be there to see its end.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  I felt dizzy looking at them and felt glad I was already sitting down. It was still satisfying to slump back into the backrest, however. This was worse than when I felt like he was turning me inside out. I blinked and suddenly found it easier to look away from the creature, turning to look at the others. My eyes came to rest on Maisie. On a nine year old child who had stared down the archangel and made him look away first. She looked between me and Raphael, before her attention was grabbed by the guard sitting next to her.

  The quiet buzz of the guards began to encompass me, as everyone quickly introduced themselves to those they didn’t already know. All but Richard, Maisie and Lance introduced themselves to me, and as what always happens when you get told too many names too fast, I forgot them all as soon as they said them. Though I did make a note of the kindly old woman who’d come to get me from the cell. Her name was Jaqueline, though she asked me to call her Jaq.

  “Ten of you,” Raphael said as the chatter died down, looking down at us. “Less than I hoped for, yet more than I could’ve reasonably expected. Let me alleviate some worries. I do not expect any of you to go toe to toe with the prisoners, and drag them back by their hair.” A chuckle went around the guards that I joined in with a few seconds after my sigh of relief.

  “You will each be returned to Earth with an angelic advisor. They will assist you with your targets, and ensure you have a connection to us and equipment to help you. This connection to the divine will also offer you some protection from what you face. Among that equipment will be a piece of Pandora that you will wear upon your person at all times. I’ll leave further explanation of this to the mortal advisors.”

  A hushed whisper sprung up a few seats across from me but I didn’t pay any attention. We’d have an advisor with us the whole time, as well as equipment to help us. Suddenly this didn’t seem so dangerous, and from Raphael’s tone he didn’t expect too much of us. We’ll get to how truly wrong I was another day, and cross that clusterfuck when we get there.

  After a moment Lance raised his hand in the air, his face that of a grown man meeting a childhood hero that he never quite stopped worshipping. “Who are our targets?” he asked after a nod from the Archangel.

  “You’ll each be given individual targets to start. And for now you won’t be told who your fellows are targeting.” The archangel stepped forward to the lip of the stage before he continued, his voice more solemn. “Michael’s teams will deal with the largest immediate threats at any time, the rest fall to you.”

  Another hand went in the air and Raphael nodded. “I’m just curious about what you meant exactly by new bodies,” said the young man who had been part of Lance’s retinue.

  Raphael nodded and clasped his hands behind his back. I was getting a crick in my neck from staring up at him. “As you know your bodies will be long gone, and can no longer be occupied by your souls. Besides, the act of returning someone to life requires a substantial amount of power and will only be used when no other options are viable, and the need is great.” Raphael relaxed his posture slightly and said lightly, “Also it's very difficult. Far easier to construct substitute bodies in your likeness.”

  “And if we die, that's it?” Someone I didn’t see asked.

  “That’s it.” Raphael finalised. “There is likely no return from that void. These bodies will be harder to kill however. You’ll be able to recover from injury faster, and will be more physically capable than your previous bodies.” The Archangel met each of our eyes again and asked. “Does anyone else wish to return to normal duty? I will hold nothing against you if that is what you wish.”

  No one said anything. As for me, I had already made up my mind. I knew the reason I was going back. Raphael nodded and stood, adopting a quasi-militaristic posture.

  “Before I end this meeting and return you to Earth, I should mention the last few points. Though almost eight thousand inmates escaped, they have not yet all reached the mortal world. Intelligence on the ground is, as you can imagine, quite shaky, but something Apep did in his breaking of the barriers between this reality and the mortal realm has caused them to appear randomly. Some will arrive on Earth an hour from now, some in a year. Perhaps fifty have already made it, if it was more than that then we’d be receiving reports of mass carnage from the agents we have on the ground.

  “Why Apep has done this, we do not know for certain. We shall continue to interrogate him to discover his plans, and should they affect your mission, you will be made aware.” I felt a little shudder pass through me at what interrogation at the hands of an archangel would be like, when mere eye contact was so unsettling. Jaq had an uneasy smile on her face too and was probably thinking the same thing as me. Or maybe she was just nervous about what was about to happen. Running through the rest of what he said made me feel a little less apprehensive. At least I wasn’t going to be walking into a battleground, and it probably meant my mother and those few I cared for were still safe. Raphael had continued talking while my mind wandered, and I listened back in, hoping I hadn’t missed anything important, but I only caught two words before I was swallowed in a wave of pure angelic light.

  “Good luck.”

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