Reckoning

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Kraus awoke curled beneath a tattered blanket on the floor, a scream of terror upon his lips.

For a moment he thought the darkness had claimed him again, that perhaps Verchiel had taken back his wonderful gift, but then realized that it was only the night collected around him. Empty bookcases and stacked metal desks emerged from the gloom as his new sight adjusted to the inky black of nighttime.

He had been dreaming, vividly recalling a time before his service to his lord and master, Verchiel. A time of woe and suffering.

Tossing back his blanket, he climbed to his feet and stood in the darkness of the room. Something was wrong; he could sense it. There was an unnatural hum, a pulsing throb like the beat of some prehistoric monster’s heart in the air around him. The sound was everywhere—it needed to be everywhere—and he felt the desperation of it worming inside him, bringing forth further memories of the dark times before he swore his fidelity to God’s warrior and his holy mission.

Kraus left the room, seeking to escape the recollections of his early days of torment, to distract himself elsewhere, but the alien thrum was with him, no matter where he went, rousing memories of a past long suppressed.

Before serving the Powers, all he had known was darkness and pain, the pity and the disdain of the sighted. He had been raised in a place very much like this one, very much like the Saint Athanasius Church and Orphanage had been before its doors were closed.

The Perry School for the Blind. It was the only home he had ever known.

Kraus moved down the darkened corridors, riding the intensifying waves of unease. He could not keep the past at bay; the memories escaped, bursting up from layers of time, as vivid as if they had occurred only moments before.

There had been others like him at the Perry School, born without sight, given up to those who cared for the less fortunate. And care they did. Oh yes, he remembered their care indeed.

Kraus approached an open door and a staircase that led down into deeper darkness. The feeling was stronger here, and he descended, drawn toward the wellspring of despair, all the while remembering.

The staff at the school for the blind treated them as lesser life forms, below even the ferocious dog kept by Mr. Albert Dentworth, the head administrator. Kraus relived the terror that would grip him every time he heard the rattling of the animal’s chained collar and its nails clicking and clacking on the hardwood floors as it drew closer. They were nothing but burdens to the world and to the personnel whose job it was to care for them, and were often told as much. For the majority of his existence he lived in Hell, and every night he prayed to be brought to Heaven.

The stairway took him to the gymnasium and into the lair of the Archons. At the moment, they were gone, off with Verchiel on his latest incursion. An intricate, mystical circle had been drawn upon the floor with what looked like dirt, and above it, from thick chains, the prisoner hung. A deep, vertical gash had been cut from the prisoner’s chest to his stomach, the wound held open with metal clamps, and Kraus wondered how it was even possible that the prisoner still lived.

As a child, his every waking moment, and before going to sleep at night—exhausted from chores that left his fingers stiff and bleeding—Kraus had prayed for God to take him away. He didn’t think himself more deserving than any of the others who lived beneath the roof of the Perry School, it was just that he’d had his fill and wanted it to stop. He couldn’t live like that any longer, and each night he begged the merciful Creator to end his life.

The first of the fallen moaned pitifully, and a strange, red-colored cloud puffed from his open chest to be trapped within the confines of the mystical circle beneath. Kraus found himself driven back by an overwhelming sense of desolation that suddenly permeated the atmosphere. He had found the source of his waking malaise, and whatever it was, it came from within the body of the fallen angel Lucifer.

Kraus heard the angel that he would later call his master, as he had those many years ago—Verchiel, whispering in his ear, telling him he had been sent by God, and that because of his fervent prayers, he had been chosen to aid the soldiers of the Lord in the most important of missions.

Kraus remembered the incredible joy, the sheer euphoria of knowing that God had heard his pleas, but at the time he had been filled with great sorrow. He knew that only he would know this happiness, and those brothers and sisters in darkness with whom he had shared the hell of the Perry School would continue to know only suffering. How could he do the work of God, knowing that others like himself still suffered?

And the angel Verchiel had offered him a solution. “You can end their suffering,” he had said. “All you need do is command me, for this will be my payment to you, for the fealty you will swear to me. All you need do is ask.”

So Kraus had begged the messenger of Heaven to release the others of the Perry School from their lives of suffering and sorrow.

And Verchiel had obliged.

The memory of that night drove Kraus to his knees. He was trembling, awash in the raw, unconstrained emotions of that moment long ago. Whatever was leaking from the body of Lucifer, it was quite proficient in dredging up the echoes of the past.

Kraus recalled the night he was reborn as a servant of the Powers, pulled from the relative warmth of the school into the heights of the cold night sky, the sound of Verchiel’s beating wings almost deafening. And he heard the cries of other heavenly creatures around him as he was carried higher and higher.

“They shall know suffering no longer,” the angel who would be his master had roared, and the sky around them rumbled as if in agreement. The flash of lightning that followed somehow permeated the darkness that was his existence. He remembered the searing white light and the roar of thunder that shook the air.

Kraus gulped for air, his body sliding down the cool concrete of the gymnasium wall. The memories were unmerciful, his senses raw.

Somehow he could feel the lightning strikes upon the school, the smell of it as it burned filling his nostrils, the cries of those trapped within filling his ears.

He had always told himself that it was for the best. The students of the Perry School had been freed from a pathetic existence; he truly believed that. But lately he had begun to see things more clearly, and was filled with horror. Since Verchiel’s gift to him, his perceptions were slowly changing, revealing the ugly reality of it all.

The air around him shimmered and quaked, and Kraus knew that his master had returned, but he did not feel joy as he would have in the past, only apprehension.

The angels appeared before him. There were fewer Powers soldiers, and those who remained mere shadows of their once glorious selves. They appeared haunted, the armor they wore hanging loosely upon their diminished frames.

And then there was Verchiel, the sight of him filling the healer with a strange mixture of sadness and fear. His once golden chest plate was tarnished almost black with the blood of his prey, and the freshly opened wounds continued to weep, saturating the bandages the healer had used to dress them.

Verchiel fell to his knees before the mystic circle. “The time is nigh,” he said, and the remaining Archons scurried about their preparations.

But for what? Kraus wondered, an overwhelming feeling of dread reaching down to the depths of his soul. He wanted to ask the angel that was his lord and master, but he feared what the answer would be.