Leaderboard

Comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

As with my Originals review reply thread, this is currently for a single story, but who knows? Maybe I’ll have more stories in this category in the future.

The Least I Can Do is...kind of an odd thing. In 2008, I read JayDee’s story Whore of Heaven in the mistaken belief that it not being snuff meant that the female lead, the Archangel Luzurial, would be okay in the end. What she ended up as was the opposite of okay. Instead of being angry or grossed out (I can handle gore fairly well), I was just really sad for her, to the point that I emailed JayDee and asked if I could write a non-canon sequel where things got better for her. Ten years later, that ended up as the giant modern fantasy story The Woman in the Statue, which JayDee enjoyed enough that it actually became canon (and which I will finish some day!). However, as I started posting WitS, I decided I’d post reviews for Whore of Heaven, mostly because reviewing is always the nice thing to do on AFF, and because it felt wrong not to leave reviews for the thing I was currently writing a sequel to. I figured that, having already read it, it wouldn’t be as upsetting the second time around. I was wrong. So I spent at least a week depressed after rereading WoH, and during that week, I went home from work one night, sat down at my computer and this story just kind of happened. I didn’t post it initially, but Azrael visiting his friend is something JayDee mentioned a couple times in other stories, and lately The Least I Can Do, or at least the subject matter, has popped up in conversations recently, so I finally decided to post it. Speaking of @JayDee… Part of what changed from the rough draft I sent you months back is the timeline. For those only reading now, the timeskip originally went to “8 billion years later,” shortly after the Sun would have finished casting off its outer layers and becoming a white dwarf. But then, while discussing my Whore of Heaven reviews, JayDee clarified that no angels were actually meant to have released Luzurial, but that she was only supposed to be freed when the coating disintegrated due to entropy. This meant the time for her release went from 120 trillion years in the future (after the last stars burn out) to an absolute minimum of 2 trillion trillion trillion years in the future, and given how mean-spirited the original ending of WoH was, I figure it’s better to assume maximum proton half-life, which means it would take 30 million trillion trillion trillion years for all matter to break down. That’s why the timeskip moved to 140 trillion years in, to reflect that even after all the stars have burned out, she’s still there, still suffering in ways the human mind can’t even comprehend, and not only is her entire previous life a nigh-invisible speck compared to how long she’s spent being tortured, but even the amount of time she’s spent being tortured so far is itself a nigh-invisible speck compared to how much agony she has to look forward to. Of course, that’s also why I have Azrael visiting and holding her hand. It doesn’t alleviate her suffering, and she might not even be able to sense anything other than pain, but he just wants her to know she isn’t alone. I suppose it might serve as a bit of a consolation prize. I even twisted the knife further with the condemnatory tone of the Seraphim’s orders not to release her, drawing on stuff you said in the past for vintage JayDee flavor. I kind of debated who would be talking to Azrael. Originally it was the Archangel Uriel, and for a while it was the Archangel Samael, just to suggest how bad what’s happening is. In addition to being an angel of death, Samael serves as Ha-Satan (“the accuser,” not to be confused with Heylel/Lucifer), responsible for arguing against humanity; he’s sometimes referred to as a prosecuting attorney. I imagine this requires him to be super detached, so if something was making him uncomfortable, it had to be bad. Ultimately, though, I put Lailah in there for two reasons. First, because I liked the “bookends” idea, that as Angel of Conception she’s kind of the opposite of Azrael and Samael. Second, I liked the idea of her little interaction with Bernice. I mean, woman died trying to attack a demon to rescue an angel, in the process displaying the most moral courage and basic decency of anyone present. She’s probably going somewhere nice. I figured that once she got there, her first concern would probably still be what was happening to Luzurial, and even knowing that she’s a cop and that breaking the rules would not be something she approves of, I imagine she would still feel grateful for Luzurial trying to help and wouldn’t want to see her suffer. And I did like Lailah’s interaction with her. Bernice is Jewish, after all, so she may have heard childhood stories about Lailah and it’s kind of surreal meeting her (it’s surreal meeting Michael as well, but there Bernice is more focused on getting help, so the weirdness of the situation is pushed into the background), and Lailah of course is in full Mom mode, trying to comfort an upset child. Yeah, I kind of liked that too. The idea is that he’s just as upset about not being allowed to help Luzurial as everyone else is, and given the amount of power he’s channeling, just a little bit getting released is basically an explosive shockwave. That is correct. As far as WitS and associated stories go, everything pre-timeskip is canon. That’s actually an interesting idea, that perhaps new things are added to Heaven by mortals who go there, but in this case that pyramid was meant to be an older feature. I was thinking that the structures built by angels would be really ancient architecture, and the pyramid I had envisioned was sort of a hybrid of Egyptian and Mesoamerican architecture, with the overall smooth sides looking like an Egyptian pyramid, but with inlaid steps like an Aztec pyramid. The gold and marble were just colors I sort of liked. I have another short story I want to write, set during the Fall (would likely go in the Bible section due to that) and with Lailah as the PoV character, with Luzurial, Gabriel and others showing up as well, where the story starts with fighting on the side of the pyramid, complete with some of the attacks flying back and forth melting bits of it (it’s been fixed by TLICD). Yeah, I kind of wanted the idea that Azrael is a little jaded to the death going on on Earth, but when Lailah suggests that something worse is happening, that creeps him out. Yeah, that was a decision made by a rather detached one, I’d imagine, who wasn’t thinking with a lot of empathy.

It seems that like the last post in Shadows all we are left with is the white snow sound and a cliffhanger for RL. May their road rise up to meet them, may the Sun shine gently on their faces, may the wind cool their brow and may they be in Heaven an hour before the Devil even knows of their passing.