Blades of radiant flame tore through the air, as a melodious harp was strummed by expert fingers. Voices of outrage cried out as armed knights and mages tried to futilely defend themselves using metal and magic. A dirge was played for a great crowd of criminals, becoming the soundtrack to their executions. The screaming and battle cries continued and were accompanied by the roaring flames and harpistry. Then finally, silence fell and when it did, it wasn’t the only thing that fell.
Diaphanous wings fell from the air, some of them plain, some of them colored like stained glass. Rainbow-colored faces, topped with even more colorful, whimsically done hair, and framed by long, elegantly pointed ears, fell as well, frozen in looks of horror, outrage, hate, and extreme unwillingness. Bodies dressed in decadent silk, satin, and well-treated human-hide fell last.
Now I, and a few random humans, stood before the lone survivor of an aerial battle. A radiant humanoid form in a gallant, radiant, suit of metal plate. A suit of armor that shined like the sun at sunset. Shining a brilliant, blazing, orange. Six wings gracefully flapped at her back, two of the wings were grayish rather than the perfect white of the other four. A giant diamond filled with countless shining eyes hovered behind the wings, a hint of the flying woman’s true, hyperdimensional form.
That woman was Florence Moody. She was the other angel. The one I mentioned was part of a package deal that came with Ms.Scholar. She took on a much more human, and humane, form as she landed. Innocently disregarding the mess she’d made as if the corpses that lay behind her had nothing to do with her. Tall and athletically built with olive skin, Florence had an expressive, holy feel to her, that combined with an innocent, nearly naive, vibe that made it awkward to deal with her. Now Florence Moody regarded me with a face that was somewhat long, bore a large nose, and large lips. Her big green eyes were slightly narrowed as if she were thinking hard about something. Her thin eyebrows briefly furrowed before straightening out again. After awkwardly running her hands through her curly golden hair she approached.
“Thank you for waiting, Mister Calloway…” said Florence.
“Uh…Yeah. No problem,” I said. Because what else was I going to say, beyond the fact, I really hadn’t had much in the way of plans for the day, she’d done all the world.
“We hope this won’t be an issue. We’d hate to have put you in an awkward position,” said Ellison Scholar. Taking over. The angel’s height dropped by about 2 feet to a more human 6 '1’’, her skin tone darkening, and the lines of her body and face adjusting to the ones that I was more familiar with.
I shrugged. Good didn’t necessarily always mean nice, and while I genuinely didn’t mind what had just taken place here a few minutes ago. There “was” something that chafed about having someone blow up an entire septic tank, inside your living room, and then sheepishly hope they weren’t creating a mess.
Let’s simply say that devils weren’t suddenly so brutal because of their falls. The unrelenting zeal of the angels was something respected and feared throughout the entire cosmos. This is why I imagine the House, and organizations, like the house, tended to work closely with such groups, for the sake of not stepping afoul of them.
Angels were a hardnosed crowd at times, who would see their objectives met with very few arguments, or excuses, capable of stopping them. So, while I could tell that Ellison and Florence, or rather Ellison/Florence were being genuine, the fact that my circumstances wouldn’t have stopped them from doing what they felt they must do, and what the host had commanded them, made it feel ingenuine.
This also made me a bit hesitant about getting involved with this pair. Especially in the romantic sense. Could the family ever come first, when the host would always be a major priority in their lives? I don’t know. Still, the Empty-Society was likely going to be dealing with the holy host a lot in the future, so I made sure to stay civil.
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Now, where was I? Where should I even start?… Okay, so, I was going out for some ice-cream. That’s a good place to start, right? Yuval had recommended this one ice-cream joint that was funnily enough started by one of the ex-supervillains that I’d counseled a few years ago. After curing their son’s incurable illness and paying back their debt to society, the ice-themed mad doctor had decided to go into something that could combine a new love of cooking with their knowledge of cryogenics, so they started frozen treats. The business was pretty small right now, but I could definitely see it blowing up, and getting really popular especially if it was good enough for a literal Demonlord of Gluttony to give them props.
While I was on my way to get that ice-cream, I asked out Ellison because well, I kind of felt bad. A big part of this trip was supposed to be me getting to know some of the ladies who’d asked to come along to the Sigfrid Galaxy, for the sake of getting to know me, and potentially joining my family. It all had some very weird, “dating reality show”- vibes, at times. Yet, with my wives persistent urging, I tried to go along with it, because our family still needed one or two more people before we’d be stable enough to properly settle down.
As far as that particular endeavor was going, it actually wasn’t going too badly. I had good feelings about how things were going with me and Hong Mirae. Kian and Yuval were definite maybes. Like strong maybes. Jack and Kal certainly liked them all well enough, and seemed like they were strongly in favor of three women to an extent where Jack was now hinting that I should consider marrying all three. And honestly, while the process of getting to know each other wasn’t quite over, I was gradually growing more and more convinced.
The only exception was Miss Scholar, who in theory I should have had a lot in common with since she was an angelic scribe, and I was the keeper of one of the largest archives of knowledge in the cosmos. Scribe + Librarian seemed like a very solid, if potentially somewhat dull, romance novel, just waiting to be written. Yet, as far as our actual interactions went. We were cordial, and eventually grew to be more or less friendly, but that was it. I wouldn’t say our chemistry was bad. Rather it’d be better to say our chemistry was non-existent.
However, then again, maybe that sounds a bit too harsh. Technically speaking, I’d say there was barely any chemistry between me and Yuval, or me and Kian, until this little trip. Frankly speaking, I was probably just getting my just desserts. I was self-aware enough to know I could be a bit of a cold fish, and I’d just gotten very lucky so far, as far as romantic encounters go, and thus very spoiled, I think.
It’s likely this was what happened when I ran into another cold fish. On the other hand, Kian and Yuval were just another two of my friends until this trip, and now we were definitely something more, with the potential for becoming something serious. Ellison was a complete stranger, and we’d barely managed to become friendly after the passage of so many years. So maybe the current state of things “did” bode ill for me and Ellison turning into something more.
If we were mortals, I’d say that maybe us becoming a thing just simply wasn’t in the cards, but we weren’t and immortal romances could be pretty damn slow. For example, me and Kal took decades, if not centuries, for things to get serious for us, and we’d basically started off as friends. The point being, that between all the other stuff an immortal might have going on, we could tend to be pretty slow-moving when it came to things like romance and choosing a mate.
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Anyway, I was heading out to get some ice-cream, and I ended up asking Ellison to come with me. Figuring I’d maybe try and make up for the lack of interactions between the two of us. We were halfway to the ice-cream place when suddenly, Ellison turned into Florence and Florence told me that she’d need to stop and do an errand that the Angelic Host had just asked her to handle. Not wanting to be the one to ruin a sort of date, I said yeah, because why not.
The errand turned out to be Florence going over to this universe’s largest wonderland, or “fae-realm” to sort out the local court of Autumn, because under the Dark Bell Collective’s rule, the local court of Autumn had gotten pretty…Unseelie. I’d thought our Empty-Society had sorted them out once we’d taken over, but I guess I was wrong. Old habits had apparently risen up again, with certain parties that the Empty-Society apparently mistakenly allowed to keep their miserable lives, influencing the Autumn court like the rotten apples that they were.
Long story short, these stupid evil fae aristocrats had apparently been fucking around enough, with such “fun” activities, like kidnapping, torturing, and enslaving mortals. They’d been going so overboard that they’d messed up the cosmic balance to enough of a degree that the Angelic Host had felt a need to say “Howdy” in the way only avenging angels can. Which is why, the angels sent a “warning” in the form of Florence, a former-cherubim of the host, that had not only fallen, but had lost her own body, and thus needed to share a body with Ms. Scholar.
On the one hand, I couldn’t help being annoyed that they’d done this unilaterally without talking to the Empty-Society first. It kind of put the Empty-Society in a politically sticky situation with the rest of this universe’s fae and the fae-royalty of the neighboring universes.
On the other hand, maybe our Empty-Society didn’t really care what the rest of this universe’s elder fae thought. Based on some of the messed up stuff I was picking up just by being in this wonderland, perhaps the angels' intervention was the sole reason that there weren’t going to be a bunch of Empty-Harvesters, Fadelings, and constructs cleaning up the smoldering remains of this wonderland, after our Empty-Society decided to just outright purge it all.
It was also possible that what was left of the Autumn court, and the equally problematic Spring Court, might continue fucking around, and they’d find out the limits of the Empty-Society’s patience. If we weren’t already so preoccupied with the situation with the Dark Song Orchestra, it seems that there was still a fair amount of housekeeping for us to do.
You know what, never mind. Forget what I just said, The DSO wasn’t a good enough of an excuse for us "not" to tidy up when we saw roaches scuttling around in our house like they owned the place. It seems my life was going to be getting a fair bit busier, and I’d probably need to bring Jack and Kal in on this, so they could do the same for the rest of our territories.
