Chapter 66: Ch-66: Absolute Disrespect
Uriel lay where he had fallen, the grass soft beneath him, the garden quiet as though nothing unusual had occurred.
The air held its mild warmth. The sourceless light remained steady, diffused and golden beneath the broad canopy of the seventh tree.
A faint breeze moved through the leaves, and the sound it made was almost like distant water.
For a moment, he did nothing.
The garden did not rush him. It never rushed anything.
He drew a slow breath, more habit than necessity, and took stock. The old discipline rose naturally, as it always did. He checked the shape of himself, the alignment, the subtle tensions that told him where the impact had settled.
The report came back in fragments, quiet and practical.
Bruised, but intact.
A lingering ache across his shoulders, a tightness along his ribs where the force had folded him through stone and distance.
Nothing broken that would not mend, nothing lost.
He had endured worse.
Long ago, before dust had learned to gather on stone, before the mortal world had found its rhythm, he had been struck by things that cracked horizons and burned silence into noise.
He remembered those impacts as one remembered storms: distant now, but still large.
He filed those under difficult.
This one... he paused, feeling again the clean, effortless force behind it, the absence of strain, the simple dismissal of it.
Different.
He opened his eyes.
Above him, the ceiling of the garden stretched in pale stone, and the sight made him still again.
There were four holes now.
The first stood where it always had, the shaft carved carefully through the stone, the one that had allowed ropes and cautious descent.
Beside it, wider and rough-edged, were the two breaks left when Vothanael had passed through carrying Lucifer. The stone there had fractured outward, like something had been pushed aside rather than opened.
And then there was the newest.
Small. Clean. Neat enough to seem deliberate.
Uriel-shaped.
Sunlight fell through them, pale desert morning slipping into the garden in narrow columns.
Dust motes drifted through the beams, slow and lazy, turning in the air like tiny golden fish. The garden accepted the new light easily.
It mingled with the sourceless glow without conflict, as though the place had always expected this.
Uriel pressed his hands into the grass and pushed himself upright.
The grass bent beneath his palms, cool and faintly damp, then rose again when he lifted them.
It brushed lightly against his fingers, as though reassuring him of its presence. The scent of green things lingered faintly, fresh and calm, entirely unconcerned with the violence that had just passed through the ceiling.
Amara crouched beside him.
She had approached quietly, her expression already settled into that thoughtful stillness he had seen grow in her over the past hours.
Her eyes moved across him, quick and careful, measuring posture and breath.
"Are you --" she began.
"Yes," he said.
The answer came before the question finished, calm and even. There had never been much point in waiting for the rest.
She studied him a moment longer, then followed his gaze upward.
The four holes, The descending light.
The quiet garden.
"He backhanded you," she said.
"Yes."
Her mouth tightened slightly, not in fear, but in the careful adjustment of someone filing a new fact into an already crowded understanding.
"Through forty-three metres of Negev bedrock."
"Yes."
The words hung between them, simple and unadorned.
Kinvara stood a short distance away, her gaze fixed on the ceiling. Her face remained composed, though something thoughtful had entered her eyes, a slow recalibration.
Sixty years of believing in extraordinary things had taught her patience, but even patience had its moments of reconsideration.
"Right," Amara said softly.
She reached for her satchel and drew out her notebook. The leather cover creaked faintly as she opened it. She uncapped her pen, the small, ordinary sound oddly grounding in the quiet.
She wrote the date.
Then, after a brief pause, she wrote beneath it:
He backhanded an angel through the ceiling.
She looked at the line, considering it, as though weighing whether it required embellishment.
It did not, she added a period.
The garden breathed around them.
Leaves shifted gently overhead. The seventh tree’s golden canopy cast its warm light across the northern end, soft and steady. The sunlight from above mingled with it, pale desert brightness meeting the garden’s calm glow.
Uriel rose slowly to his feet.
The ache in his shoulders settled into something manageable.
He brushed his hands against his coat, a habitual gesture, though there was little dust to remove. The grass released him quietly.
"Inventory complete?" Amara asked.
"Yes."
"And?"
He glanced once more at the clean-edged hole above them.
"Different," he said.
She nodded, accepting that as sufficient.
Kinvara lowered her gaze from the ceiling.
"Well," she said quietly, "that answers something."
Uriel looked at her.
"What?"
She gestured upward, toward the neat, Uriel-shaped aperture.
"He doesn’t favor conversation."
Uriel allowed the faintest hint of acknowledgement to cross his expression.
"Apparently not."
A handful of golden motes drifted down from the seventh tree, catching in the sunlight before dissolving softly against grass and stone.
The garden remained calm, as though the sudden rearrangement of its ceiling were simply another variation of falling leaves.
Above them, the desert stretched wide and indifferent.
At the basin’s center, Vothanael stood unmoving, hands at his sides, the void-dark fists still compressed.
His posture remained angled northward, toward the broken remains of what had once been a mountain range. He did not shift. The stillness around him felt deliberate, patient.
Far beyond, among scattered stone and dust, Lucifer took his own inventory, the desert settling slowly around him.
Uriel tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something distant, then stepped toward the base of the shaft.
Behind him, the garden held its quiet, luminous and steady, accepting angels and sunlight and falling stone alike, as though all of it belonged there.
To be continued...
(Author’s note: Its just a moment of levity for our poor Uriel over here. Wait for the next Chapter in an hour folks!!)
