Fine. Zuzana took a deep breath, centering herself. Then I could really use some world peace for dinner. She was all dark-eyed intensity. Something was lost in her. Karou saw it and mourned. War does that, nothing for it. Reality lays siege. Your framed portrait of life is smashed, and a new one thrust upon you. Its ugly, and you dont even want to look at it let alone hang it on the wall, but you have no choice, once you know. Once you really know.
And who was Zuzana going to be, now that this knowledge was hers?
World peace for dinner, mused Mik, scratching his beard stubble. Does that come with fries?
It freaking better , said Zuzana. Or I will send it freaking back .
The angels name was Elazael.
The church founded by her descendantsand they preferred the term church to cult , naturallywas called the Handfast of Elazael, and every girl child born in the bloodline was christened Elazael. If, then, by puberty, she had not manifested the gift, she was rechristened by another name. Eliza had been the only one in the last seventy-five years to hold on to it, and she had often thought that the worst thing of allthe cherry on the cake of her awful upbringingwas the envy of the others.
Nothing glitters in the eyes like envy. Few could know this as profoundly as she did. It had to be something special to grow up knowing that any given member of your large extended family would probably kill and eat you if it meant they could have your gift for themselves, Renfield-style.
The Handfast was matriarchal, and Elizas mother was the current high priestess. Converts were called cousins, while those of the bloodvenerated even if they didnt have the giftwere the Elioud. It was the term, in ancient texts, for the offspring of the better-known Nephilim, who were the first fruit of angels congress with humans.
It was notable that in Nephilim scripture, both biblical and apocryphal, all the angels were male. The Book of Enocha text that was canon to no group except the Ethiopian Jewstells of the leader of the fallen angels, Samyaza, ordering his hundred and ninety-nine fallen brethren to, essentially, get busy.
Beget us children, he commanded, and they complied, and no mention was made of how the human women felt about this. Unsurprising in writings of the era, the mothers had all the agency of petri dishes, and the progeny that sprang from their wombsaccompanied by, one surmised, extreme discomfortwere giants and biters, whatever that meant, whom God later bade the archangel Gabriel to destroy.
And maybe he did. Maybe they had existed,
all of them: Gabriel and God, Samyaza and his crew and all their enormous biting babies. Who knows? The Elioud dismissed the Book of Enoch as absurd, which was kind of the pot calling the kettle black, Eliza had always thought, but wasnt that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.
More or less.
The Handfast had its own book: the Book of Elazael, of course, according to which there werent two hundred fallen angels. There were four , two of whom were female, one of whom mattered. Victims of corruption in the highest rank of angels, they were maimed and cast unjustly out of Heaven a thousand years ago. What had become of the three other Fallen, or whether they did any begetting of their own, was unknown, but Elazael, for her part, by way of congress with a human husband, was fruitful and multiplied.
(As a side note, it said a lot about Elizas insular childhood and early educationor lack thereofthat she was a teenager before she learned that the governing body of the United States was called Congress. In her world, it meant the act that leads to begetting. Coupling. Loin fruit. Doing it. As a consequence, congress still sounded sexual to her every time she heard itwhich, living in Washington, D.C., was often.)
In the Book of Elazael, unlike in the patriarchal Book of Enoch, or Genesis for that matter, the angel wasnt the giver of seed, but the receiver. The angel was mother, was womb , and, credit nature or nurture, her offspring werent monstrous.
At least not physiologically.
The Book of Elazael wasnt written down until the late eighteenth centuryby a freed slave named Seminole Gaines who married into the matrilineal clan and became its most charismatic evangelist, growing the church, at its height, to number nearly eight hundred worshippers, many of whom were also freed slaves. Of the angel Elazael herself, he wrote that she was ebon-dark, and the quicks of her eyes white as starfire, though, living eight hundred years after she did, he was hardly an unimpeachable source. Beyond that obviously massive heresya black mother angel; no, even better: a fallen black mother angelthe book was actually pretty orthodox, derivative enough that it could almost have been the result of an epic session of magnetic poetry, Bible edition.
You know, if magnetic poetry had existed in the late eighteenth century. Or refrigerator doors.