Chapter 630 The Light

The man who had stepped out of the light walked across the ground without hurry, without sound, and without so much as glancing at the Monarchs. The Abyss parted before him, on the ground, the youngest Ruler lifted his head. He stared. He opened his mouth, and nothing came out. His face went through disbelief, then wonder, then something raw and cracked and shining that he had not felt in ten thousand years.

"Brothers," he whispered. "Brothers, look."

One by one, the Rulers raised their heads.

Light was already gathering in their eyes, a faint and trembling shimmer that none of them had been able to summon in an hour. The eldest Ruler pushed himself up on one elbow with blood running down his chin and stared at the approaching figure as though he were looking at the sun after a lifetime in a cave.

"It is not possible," he said hoarsely. "It cannot be.."

"It is," said the youngest. He was laughing, or weeping, or both. "It is him. He has come."

"Michael!" The tall silver-bearded Ruler dragged himself forward on his hands, his beard matted with dark ichor. "Lord Michael, you came! You saw, you knew... finally, we are saved."

"We are saved!" cried another. "Lord Michael, the Shadow Monarch has held us here, he is now completely a being of darkness..."

"Please," said the eldest. His voice shook. "We have done our duty to the end O great angel.."

The man stopped.

He stood in the ring of the fallen, looking down at them, and he did not say anything at first. His face was still hard to hold in the mind. It was the face of a man in his prime or the face of a boy or the face of something far older than either, and the light behind his eyes was calm and clear and entirely without anger.

"I have heard," said Michael, "everything."

"I heard the council in your hall. I heard you speak of balance and necessity. I heard you say that the dying of a world was an acceptable cost. I watched you unleash creatures on a realm that had done nothing to you, and I watched you sit in comfort and call it order." He closed his eyes briefly. "I gave you your charge so many ages ago. Guard the doors and protect order. That was all I asked."

"My lord..."

"You were never meant to rule," said Michael.

The eldest Ruler’s mouth moved and dread crossed his face.

"Lord Michael," he whispered, "You can’t be considering..."

Michael raised his hand.

There was no sword. There was no fire. There was only a light, a single, quiet, perfect light, and it fell across the eight fallen beings. Six great wings of radiance unfolded behind him, vast and silent, and every shadow in the Abyss flinched from them. The Rulers had time to gasp. The silver-bearded Ruler reached out a trembling hand as if he could catch the light. The eldest Ruler’s lips shaped one last word, and no one ever knew what it was.

The youngest Ruler lifted his eyes. "I told them," he said, very softly. "I told them.."

"I know," said Michael.

The light passed through them, and they were gone.

It did not hurt. That was the strangest part. There was no scream and no cry, only a soft breath of golden dust that rose from the ground and drifted away into the dark, and eight small piles of white robes settling slowly onto the floor with no one inside them. Then the light folded itself away, and the wings dimmed, and Michael lowered his hand.

Nobody spoke.

Clark had stopped moving. Kara’s mouth hung open. Zatanna’s hand had gone to her throat, and Frost had taken a full step back. Beast Boy’s eyes were wide enough to swallow his whole face. They had been seconds from doing the same thing themselves. They had spent an hour, a week, a long time fighting for this moment, and the man who had just taken it from them had done it with a gesture so gentle it was almost an afterthought.

And Arthur, still holding the scythe halfway down, stared at the empty robes with an expression no one in that room had ever seen on his face.

He was surprised.

Michael turned.

He walked toward Arthur through the dark, and he stopped a few paces away, and he inclined his head. It was a slight bow, courteous and precise.

"Arthur Blackwynd," he said. "Shadow Monarch. I greet you."

Arthur let the scythe dissolve into smoke. "Michael."

"This is not how I wished us to meet," said Michael. A trace of regret touched his voice. "I had hoped for a quieter beginning, an introduction made in good faith, in peace. But I did not want to waste what precious time remained, and I wished to speak with you as soon as I could." His eyes moved briefly over the ground, the scattered robes, the shattered ground. "I believed this would be faster."

"It was," Arthur said dryly. "You’ve saved me the trouble, even though I had a much better punishment in mind."

"I have also done something else." Michael’s gaze returned to him. "Every gate that opened over your world is closed. All of them, the ones that have been spawning across your cities for months now. None will open again. There will be no more dungeons, no more monsters pouring into the streets. Your hunters will no longer need to raid them to keep the world safe."

There was a silence.

"You didn’t have to do that," said Arthur. His voice was very even. "I wanted them to close those gates themselves now. Before I killed them."

Michael met his eyes for a long moment.

"Cruel," he said at last. "But I suppose it is a form of justice."

"It is," Arthur agreed.

"Arthur?" Kara said carefully. She had come up beside him, and she was looking at the stranger with narrow, wary eyes. "Who is this?"

"I know him," said Raven.

She said it slowly, almost to herself. She was staring at Michael with a pale, strange expression, and her hands had gone still at her sides. "I don’t know how. I’ve never seen him. I’ve never even heard of him, not that I can remember, but there’s something in me, in the Demon power, that knows exactly what he is." She swallowed. "That’s Michael. The archangel."

Zatanna drew a sharp breath. Frost muttered something under her breath that was not polite. Clark said nothing at all. His eyes had gone to Arthur’s face, and then to Michael’s, and he was watching the silence between them very carefully.

"Don’t do anything unnecessary," Raven said. She didn’t lower her voice. "I mean it. Not one of you. Whatever this is, whatever he wants, we let Arthur handle it."

Kara’s jaw tightened. " Even though they were already dying but he just killed eight beings in front of us without lifting a finger."

"I know," Raven said. "That’s why."

Michael had turned away from them, and was looking up, slowly, into the vast and empty black. He took in the faint trails of residual energy that curled through the dark like smoke from a dead fire, the lingering whispers of the magic of death. He was silent for a long moment.

"What an awful place," he said at last, "your consciousness that is."

Arthur’s eyebrow rose.

"It was difficult even for me to enter," Michael went on. He didn’t sound offended. He sounded, if anything, faintly fascinated. "There is a great deal in here. A great deal that has been held down for a long time. I do not think this is a place for conversation." He turned back. "I wish for us to speak elsewhere. Somewhere proper, perhaps a garden on Earth, in your own home, if you would allow it."

Arthur didn’t answer at once.

He looked at the archangel for a long time. The dark pulsed faintly around them both, and somewhere deep in its folds, something very large shifted in its sleep. His hands were quiet at his sides, and his eyes, still faintly violet, gave away nothing.

"We will return there shortly," he said finally, "and we will talk. But first my friends must rest. We have been fighting this war for a long while."

"Of course," said Michael gently. "Then I shall take my leave first."

He lifted one hand, and the seam of light opened behind him, and he stepped through it. The golden line sealed behind him with a faint, ringing note, and the Abyss closed over the place where he had been as though he had never stood there at all.

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