Archangel’s Ascension (The Guild Hunter Series)

Today

No one had ever described ascension to Illium. In truth, he’d never thought to ask. It had seemed self-evident: a massive surge of power into an angel’s body that forever altered him into something other, even among angelkind. He’d thought he’d experienced an aborted ascension when the Cascade attempted to force power into him.

How foolish he’d been.

The first punch of that violent energy, it was as he’d imagined—but it didn’t come from without. It came from within. As if a closed door in his mind had suddenly blown off with a force so vicious that it sent him to the sky without his conscious volition. Resisting it was an impossibility. To be an archangel was to be remade by the forces of the world itself. It was agony and it was beauty and it was all he was and all he could become and it was eternity.

As he hung in the sky, held up by nothing but the power of ascension, he felt it begin—the alteration of his cells. Each and every one in his body beginning to change in an unstoppable cascade. Every particle that made him Illium was reshaped in this endless time that was his ending and his beginning.

Intellectually, he knew it wasn’t endless. He’d witnessed Suyin’s ascension, read about others in their histories. But in this space that he occupied in the universe, time had slowed to where a breath took an eon, and his heart didn’t pulse so much as wait in echoing silence, the pause between beats was so long.

In that forever, he saw himself being born, a red-faced infant his mother cradled to her breast with infinite tenderness while tears streamed down her face. He cried, too, at the beauty of her love for him, her child that she’d nurtured in her womb.

Next to her stood Aegaeon, his face awash in a wonder that made him seem a wholly different man. The hand with which he touched his son’s head was proud, the kiss he pressed to Sharine’s cheek one of utmost love.

Another man. Gone now.

Illium mourned the loss even as his heart overflowed at being loved by a mother luminous and full of joy…and old, so, so old. He felt it now, the weight of her years, the countless scars on her soul, the fine fractures that had spread outward in a slow creep until they broke her. And still, she was this being radiant who grew ever stronger. To be the son of Sharine, the Hummingbird? It was the greatest honor he could imagine.

He saw every moment of his childhood, from birth to toddlerhood.

His heart cracked at his first glimpse of Aodhan, re-formed again with rivers of glittering brightness within that was his love for the boy who ran with him in his memories, racing him to the gorge so that they could get up to mischief.

Eyes of infinite blue looking into his as Raphael crouched down so that they were eye to eye. There was an amused affection in his smile and his expression held a care that Illium felt down to his bones. He had always known that Raphael loved him. But today…today he saw into the heart of an archangel, and he knew that he had always had a father even after Aegaeon’s abandonment.

In his mind’s eye, he held out his hand to the man he called Rafa, and his Rafa took it before rising, and they walked together through the Refuge, a boy with too-big wings that trailed on the ground, and a warrior strong and tall who had never lost his ability to care for the most vulnerable among them.

The hand altered, became dark-skinned, with the golden stripes of a tiger beneath, and when he looked up, the man who walked with him had eyes of liquid silver and hair the same. He showed Illium a huge white spider that hid against the snow, then pulled him onto his back and went running through the craggy edges of the Refuge where Illium wasn’t permitted to go on his own.

Screams of boyish delight, the crisp bite of snow.noveldrama

But the back wasn’t Naasir’s now. It was that of a deadly vampire who swung him around into his arms and gripped his jaw as he told Illium not to do that again lest he hurt himself. Dmitri’s eyes were dark and intent, his hold gentle. But only now did Illium see the agony hidden in the dark, the anguish that Dmitri had never shared with him, and he understood that Dmitri had once been a father.

His mother’s voice as she made him honey cakes to take with him to sword training and asked about his day at school. Sharine racing out from their home to wave the wrapped packet at him because he’d forgotten it in his rush. Her arms holding him tight and moving him from side to side against her as he laughed and squirmed, saying he’d be late…but delighted by her affection all the same.

She smelled of sunlight and joy and home.

Then there he was again. A young man of radiant light, so bright and strong that he stopped Illium’s heart. Especially when he smiled.

They flew together, finding new routes, making their own paths.

Shadows. Grief. Loss.

He wanted to turn his face, not look at those parts of his life, but ascension demanded everything. He couldn’t turn away. So he saw his father go into Sleep. He saw his mother forget him. And he saw Aodhan leave him without ever moving away.

The agony crushed him.

Yet despite his pain, he stood firm, stood strong, his hand held out to them.

And one by one, they came back to him…even the one he didn’t want. He did turn away from Aegaeon, because that thread was done, cut. No pain at that, no second thoughts.

His mother’s laughter again, her hands on his cheeks.

His Aodhan’s smile, dazzling and ever brighter.

Raphael. Dmitri. Naasir.

The others who had come before and after. Jason, so silent and quiet, his facial tattoo a bare curve on his cheek, but there he was, handing Illium a toy he’d lost as a child and been distraught about. Jason had found it for him, even though the Jason of that time had been swathed in a silence born of another child’s terror.

Venom, so young and wild. Galen, barbarian ways and loyal heart.

Elena, stubborn new spark in eternity and owner of a piece of his heart.

Jessamy, both slender hands on her hips as she groaned while a tiny mud-splattered Illium stood in front of her doing his best impression of being sincerely remorseful.

He laughed in his ascension, cried, too, was angry, all of it at once.

A thousand faces. A million names. He saw and heard all of them in a kaleidoscope that spun and spun without ever overwhelming him.

Keir, patching him up over and over again, his hands ever gentle.

The Primary playing chess with him while seven hundred and seventy-six others watched through translucent eyes defined by a new ring of mountain blue.

Lorenzo, beating him at cards while Catalina laughed at their competitiveness.

His beloved Smoke curling up against him in her final days, when he’d just sat with her against his chest for hours, stroking her fur as she slept.

Lijuan staring at him in battle from across the field. Dead eyes. Cold eyes.

Kaia so happy and sure of herself, the sweet taste of young love, new and untried.

War, fire, loss, battle, victory.

Raising his sword for his archangel and going down on one knee as Raphael appointed him his first general. Such pride he’d felt that day and every day since. It rolled over him in a primal wave tinged with a heavy sense of grief.

Never again would anyone call him Illium, First General to Archangel Raphael.

Kissing Aodhan, the two of them tangled up in the sky, wings and limbs and spirits. A moment of clarity and unbounded peace, the knowledge that this was where he was meant to be, and who he was meant to be with.

Aodhan was his moonlight and his sunlight, his air and his heart.

Now…for the first time since they’d met, they were no longer the same. A stutter in his heart, his mind, a worry unknown. But there was no stopping this. The cells in Illium’s body had almost completed their transition into another form. The power within him…he could no more describe it than he could the wind or the air.

He could reach in his hand and scoop it up and it would overflow.

Then it did, pouring out of every cell in his body until he was nothing but light, nothing but an incandescent golden fire that burned across the entire world.