It’s been a long road...gettin’ from there to here…
The Woman in the Statue is finally complete and posted in its entirety, so let’s get to the reviews for Part Twelve. First up is one from @InvidiaRed.
It would be nice to be published some day. For now, thank you so much for the compliment!
Yeah, we took different approaches to portraying Lucifer in these stories. Yours was intended, from my read, to be somewhat comedic, and generally not as smart as he thought he was. I went with “intimidating”, or at least sought to. Setting him in contrast to Eparlegna, Lucifer was meant not to be in any way a better person, but rather the more dangerously intelligent villain, and one who has, by now, become deeply irritated by this particular demon’s antics.
I went back and forth a bit about what kind of angel Lucifer had been before the Fall. The book of Ezekiel describes what might be Lucifer’s fall, and uses the word cherub, and since I was rolling with the imagery used in the Bible being literal instead of symbolic (technically the images of angels we have show up in visions, which tend to be laden with symbolism, so there aren’t any “this is what an angel looks like” literal descriptions in the Bible; just descriptions of how people react to an angel in its natural form), the cherub imagery is pretty insane (four wings, four different heads, skin like metal and eyes all over the place), and a demonic creature based on a cherub would have looked really horrifying. However, other sources seem to have Lucifer as either an archangel (what you went with, I believe) or a seraph, and the seraph sounded really striking as well. The tie-breaker came from Islam, wherein as far as I can tell Iblis is a fallen jinn, which in the Quran are elemental fire creatures, hence the portrayal of Lucifer here as a fallen seraph.
As for the quote, yeah, never piss off your boss when your boss is the scariest thing in a place full of scary things.
Yeah, this is sort of the result of the world building I did to explain why angels think they have to be celibate. Going all the way back to Part Three, where I brought in the hierarchy and explained that only the Seraphim speak directly to the Creator, so if a mistake happens (and no one thinks to ask for clarification), it can potentially stick...for like billions of years.
Thank you for the review, and thank you for following me all the way to the end here!