An Angel’s Road to Hell

Cassandra Pendragon

A world of ash and soot, suffocating underneath a blanket of acrid smoke, greeted me. For the first time I wasn’t really there, for the first time I wasn’t a part of the scene, the memory belonged to someone else after all, but I couldn’t even see the hunched over form of a crowned human lurking close by. For all intent and purposes I was alone, truly and utterly alone. There were no plants, no animals, nothing lived upon the sea of broken stones and fading light.

The sun, a bright green ball of spiteful heat, was setting over a jagged line of looming mountains, reaching for the tormented sky like the fingers of death. Sheets of dirty glass cracked beneath my boots, which was also a first. Somehow I had a body, somehow I could move and consequentially enjoy all the amenities this lovely world had to offer, from a searing pain in my throat, every time I breathed in the noxious fumes, to a cutting ache, whenever one of the razor sharp rocks pierced through my boots. It surely seemed like I had been transported to a different world, a dead, forgotten place, even though I had been standing in front of a gleaming mirror a handful of seconds ago. As far as surprises went, this one was rather on the unwelcome side.

I grabbed a handful of my hair, pressed it against my mouth, trying to elevate the growing pain, and channelled a considerable amount of energy through my body. The relief was immediate and, blinking against the dim but cruel light, I spun on the spot with renewed vigour, searching for something, anything even remotely arcane. Hell, I would have been content with anything alive, to be honest, but there was just nothing. Not even an ugly bug scurrying away to hide between the rocks, nor the flapping of scaly wings in the distance. I couldn’t even taste a hint of moisture in the air. If I hadn’t already been there, I would have thought I had stumbled into hell but this place was even less hospitable. Hopefully it’d turn out to be less lethal as well, but I wasn’t going to jinx myself since I didn’t even know if I was in a transcendently stored memory or if I had really been sent to the most godforsaken place in the universe.

Almost as soon as the thought had formed, the earth trembled and the sky ignited with scintillating blue flames. My complaints were forgotten in a heartbeat, my wings hissing in the heavy air as they formed a dome around me, a protection that would keep me safe from anything magical. My heart thundered in my chest and I felt a sheen of sweat on my brow as I rose a metre into the air, unable to keep my balance on the shaking ground. Scowling I focused on my vision, the silvery glare overshadowing even the coiling flames, tearing the sky apart.

I gasped, the sheer amount of power racing through the heavens incomparable to anything I had ever seen and I had already remembered the day when I had stood before the Pearly Gates, ready to challenge my siblings. The planet, or whatever else it was, groaned but it didn’t break despite the horrendous display above me and it really should have. Whatever was going on made the cataclysm look like a toddler’s tantrum and, aside from myself, there shouldn’t have been a creature or a thing strong enough to withstand the crushing pull of the magic above. Even I felt its insatiable hunger while everything was drawn towards the cosmic maelstrom but despite the visual cacophony, there were no sounds, the silence almost as oppressing as the aeons shattering storm.

The glow from my skin intensified as I was forced to pump more and more power through my veins, my gaze glued to the reality defying promise of death and destruction. Fear stirred in my chest, the colossal, incomprehensible scale made me wonder if it might actually kill me, even though I shouldn’t have even been here. My fur rose, tiny charges exploding between the silvery flood, and still the thing grew, an electric blue ring of planetary proportions. It flickered and shifted, almost like a living ouroboros and then I saw a mote of silver ignite at its centre.

“That’s you. Your first transformation, your first birth,” a decidedly androgynous voice suddenly reached my ears. I whirled around, my fear sending icy spikes through my heart, but nothing was close by, the only movement the dance of loose rocks as they quivered and trembled while the planet shook. “Don’t worry, you’ve lived through it once, you can do so again. Also… if you ever want to return to your time, your home, you’ll have to reach the centre. Unless you want to take the long way around. Which should take around 15 billion years, give or take. Again, quite doable, you’ve managed once already, but I wouldn’t try. It’s going to take you about 13 years to open your eyes up there. Once that happens you should better be back in your own time. If the two of you were going to meet… you can only ever exist once.” I had no idea if I was able to strangle thin air but I’d surely find out in a minute or two. I couldn’t even wrap my head around half the preposterous claims Amazeroth, maybe, had just sprouted but what little I did understand had me already foaming at the mouth. And maybe trembling in my boots. A little.

“You shouldn’t waste your energy on me,” he…it continued, “I’m not really here. In fact I’m just about now fighting for your oh so precious friends. The very few immortal ones you still have. No need to thank me. Now listen: the book I sent you contains seven… gateways. They aren’t memories, not really. They were yours and mine but they have been saturated with so much transcendent power that they became real…ish. They contain the seven instances in our lives where we came across powers so vast that their mere presence turned even the thought of them into something more. This is the first one. Your birth. There is much to see and even more to learn, much of which I myself do not know. I can only guess, but you can watch. Do so Cassandra and maybe you’ll find your light before you wake up again. Who knows, at the very end, you might even find your darkness.” The voice vanished and I screamed, anger and frustration easily drowning out anxiety and fear.

I let loose without restraint, my aura turning into a solid sphere of silver and blue that raced away from me. There were no flames, no explosions, there was only light, bright enough that it could as well have been darkness. Utterly impenetrable darkness. Everything vanished, or maybe I did, behind a ravenous tide of nothingness while a single thought circled through my mind: if I became stuck here, I would use the small eternity until my birth to hunt down Amazeroth and dine on his core. If he trapped me in the past I would have all the time in the universe, quite literally, to become strong enough to devour him whole with Michael and his cronies for desert. And then my fury flickered. Please, please tell me this wasn’t the plan. Please tell me I wasn’t supposed to take my place here, living my life twice!

The light petered out while I wrestled against the tide of renewed fear. I was left hovering, white faced, in the middle of a crater, spanning several hundred kilometres in every direction. From the corner of my eye I saw the reddish glow in the shadows below me, but I didn’t care. I had destroyed the planet, the structural damage would sooner or later make it crumble, but I truly had more pressing problems. I didn’t even bother with the superficial stuff like how is this possible or what’s the point of seven memories if I can’t get out of this one. I even managed to push away my panic and the lingering anger. There was only one thing to do and I didn’t even have to think much. I had to get up there, one way or the other, or I’d regret it. Dearly. At least my outburst had cleared the sky. Flying through poison would have added insult to injury.

I closed my eyes and reached for my core. Imagine an infinite river, churning somewhere within you. The real tricky part wasn’t to use my power, it was making sure that I wouldn’t overdo it and shatter anything I held dear in the process. This time, though, there was nothing close by I wanted to protect, no wards I had to keep intact and I welcomed the thundering sensation when my being was filled to the brink. My wings expanded, each torrent swelling and pulsing until they touched the sky and filled the hollow darkness below me with light. A thought, a wish, and I was carried along, dancing beyond the edge of reality. I wasn’t even sure anymore whether I moved or if the sparkling cataclysm above was rushing towards me, but the closer I got, the more the pressure battered against my wings. It felt strange, since I could somehow also sense the will, the intent behind the suffocating forces. It wasn’t yet awake, it wasn’t yet… born, but the sparkling well of eternity at its centre had already formed and it was just like mine…mostly. I heard, more than I saw, another… layer, like a hidden melody. It was there and changed the… meaning of the piece, but you couldn’t really hear it on its own. Only that the song sounded a bit different in its absence.

Another wish brought me even closer and I opened my eyes again. By now I was hovering in nothingness, the planet below me a small speck of dust in an endless sea of black. There was nothing else around, only a sickly green sun, a wounded planet, cracks already forming all over its surface, and a spectacle of blue with a core of silver looming in the void. I couldn’t tell how far away it still was but I didn’t dare teleport much closer in case I ended up touching even the smallest part of the construct. There was no telling what would happen then, since the only thing I truly believed out of everything the voice had told me was: that thing over there was truly me. And then a thought struck me.

If this was my beginning, my birth, why then was there already more of the blue, corruptive miasma surrounding me then I had ever seen before? I had been born just like I was know… well, considering it felt like I had been even… more back then, I couldn’t have come in touch with the Corruption afterwards. Of course I had never changed. I had always been like this, from the very first moment I had opened my eyes. As gratifying as it felt, it also made me worry. I wasn’t anxious about my identity, if you’re already used to being one of a few hundred, knowing you’re even different from those doesn’t come as a tremendous shock, but I did wonder if I was somehow the source or at least in integral part of the Corruption. Would it exist for as long as I did, or was it the other way around? Or maybe neither? Maybe that was why I was here. To watch, to learn, to understand who I was, where I had come from.

There wasn’t much else to do anyways, unless I was prepared to force my way back. The misadventures I had suffered through in Shassa’s tomb had, at least, provided me with the vaguest sense of how to navigate between the most basic building blocks of our world. But to try could just as well backfire. What if this wasn’t my universe, so to say, but an idea come to life through cosmic powers, or better yet, even if it was, what if I destroyed Gaya’s wards in the process or simply got lost along the way? The risk was too much to bear and I wasn’t yet cornered. I could still play along without endangering my existence or anything else I treasured.

With a sigh I focused on the… egg, for want of a better world, because that was exactly how it looked like. A pulsing sphere of silver surrounded by clouds of bluish light, so powerful they seemed almost solid. While the thought of strangling Amazeroth to death, slowly, made me smile bitterly I tried to really take in everything in front of me. As I mentioned, there was nothing much around, a somewhat sickly sun and a dying planet, stuck between two different versions of myself. Which begged the question… where were the stars? With how much energy I had to channel through my limbs to simply stay untouched in the transcendent press I had stumbled into, I should have been able to see even a shadow of the creatures, crawling across the surface of distant planets, never mind the flickering light of the stars they orbited. Another memory resurfaced, a much more recent one. Approximately 15 billion years…

It had been quite a while since I had last attended a lecture on the history of our universe but that number rang a bell. Simply put, it was too large. The most precise estimates placed the beginning at around 13.8 billion years before modern Earth and if I lived in any way still within the approximate timeframe of my last death… I wouldn’t find the stars I was looking for around here. I wouldn’t find anything, to be precise. Which meant… time shouldn’t even have existed. Shit, the pieces were coming together.

I knew we, as a race, had existed before time, before structure had turned the universe into something alive, and this was a scene form before even then. I was stuck in a place were there were no rules, no governing principles. Which also explained why I had to channel more energy through my body, by now, than I had even used to heal my mom. Without my own peculiar nature, I wouldn’t even have had the chance to perceive my surroundings, I would have crumbled, the order my existence brought a stark contrast to the chaos I felt gnawing at my very essence. It also meant that it didn’t matter whether it was a memory or real… those distinctions came from order and purpose, things that didn’t exist, yet. In other words… I was royally screwed. Except… it probably also meant that my past, my future and my present were arbitrary boundaries, at best. With just a little luck I might be able to…

The dancing sparks around me coalesced into the hazy outline of a much larger body. There were tails and wings, scales and fur, but it wasn’t distinct, stuck somewhere between an idea and reality as it shifted and changed. At least the pressure subsided and I felt much less like a pig in a slaughterhouse but rather as if I somewhat belonged. My perception also shifted, the greenish light of the sun turning into a scintillating nova of colours and force, the broken planet suddenly becoming an amalgamation of possibilities, the civilisations that might have crawled across its skin, if I hadn’t wounded it beyond redemption, as real and flourishing as the explosion that would consume it in a matter of… even that much I couldn’t tell. Maybe it had already been ripped apart, maybe it would happen sometime in the future but to me, it died and lived at the same time.

And then, there was my very own shadow, a looming, bleeding tear, through which… something thundered into this lifeless, hopeless place, still stuck somewhere between what it was and what it could become. Flowery descriptions aside, it seemed like my presence was actually a wound, allowing whatever existed on the other side to cross over, just as if I had once been a part of it and now it was trying to claim me again, pouring more and more of its essence into a reality that was only now beginning to form, mirroring the desires, the intent of whatever lurked beyond the flimsy veil my birth had apparently torn asunder. The more it struggled and reached for me, the more of its energy was pumped through the gap and slowly, gradually, distinctions appeared.

What was and what had been became different from what would become, left and right, up and down were as definable as the colours that poured out of the sun. Or maybe it was my perception that was slowly adapting to the insanity around me. In the end, it didn’t make much of a difference. Whether I changed or the world did, ultimately it was the same thing and that gave me a way forward. With a thought I took hold of the spreading purpose, of the crushing tides of light, and twisted them to fit my own design, to link what I was and what I had been and propel me into a future where it would actually matter.

Panting and on my knees I blinked away my tears, Ahri’s arms wrapped around me to keep me from slumping to the floor. I couldn’t have been gone for more than a second, but something had changed and judging from her widening eyes, I wasn’t the only one who had noticed.