Chapter 2

Time meant nothing in the Pit. The darkness and silence pressed in on all sides as if to suffocate me, to choke me, to rob me of my breath and my senses until I submitted to it. I hadn't snuffed out the dim ball of Light in my hand because otherwise I feared I would fall away and there would truly be nothing left of me.

It could have been hours since I fell.

It could have been days.

Maybe even years… I had no way of knowing. I was hungry, thirsty, and tired, but there was nothing to eat or drink, and I hadn't yet tried to sleep. Stuck somewhere between Heaven and Hell, was I still mortal? Did I need food, and water, and sleep, or was the point of the Pit to make you feel like you were forever in need of those things and unable to satisfy them?

As exhausted as I felt, the idea of sleeping next to Medrion's corpse on a bed of deceased angel bones didn't exactly appeal; if I was going to die, I preferred to face it with as much dignity as I could, and that meant I had to try to get out of here.

No matter the cost.

That was when I heard it. A sound, somewhere in the silence. Weak. Faint. Barely audible, but there nonetheless. In the deadening, purposeful quiet of the Pit, even the faintest noise could mean something; no matter what it was. This sounded like a voice. It was barely a syllable, a deep murmur heard almost as if through water.

I looked across at Medrion—no, it hadn't been his voice.

Another trick? I thought to myself.

But then I heard it again.

Unlike Medrion's voice, this one seemed to be coming from… outside. Outside? Looking around, using my dwindling Light to pierce the gloom, I saw only solid rock walls all around me. Walls, bones, and Medrion's corpse. But there was a voice, somewhere out there—or, at least, there had been.

I waited, listened. I could hear my own pulse pounding against my eardrums getting louder, and louder. Then I heard it again, but closer this time. Someone was talking; I knew I couldn't be imagining it. I scrambled toward where I thought it was coming from, only to find myself face to face with the same stone walls.

I wasn't sure why I had expected anything different, but I felt around the wall desperately, hoping to find a hole or an opening, anything. There had to be something. That was the only way I could have been hearing anything at all coming from the other side. But the wall was stubbornly intact, not even a crack.

I heard the voice again, only this time it seemed weaker and more distant than the previous two times I had heard it.

It's going away.

I placed my hand against the stone wall and screamed. "Help! Is anybody out there?!"

It seemed hopeless to scream into the void, but it was all I could think to do. I waited, ear pressed up against the cold stone, until I heard the voice again. Yes! There it was again, closer than it had ever been. I couldn't understand what it was saying, or even who was speaking, but there was definitely someone there, just on the other side.

"Please help me!" I yelled, banging on the stone wall with my hand, "I don't know how to get out of here!"

Something happened, then, that I hadn't expected.

A chunk of the rock wall I had banged against… fell off. It dropped to the ashen ground underneath me with a dull thud, sending up a small puff of dust as it did. Dumbfounded, I stared at the rock, shone my Light against it, picked it up, turned it around in my hands—it was small, barely a few inches thick. It would have been unremarkable if it hadn't just come from the walls of the Pit.

I was pretty sure I didn't have the strength to break solid rock with my fists.

I felt around the rock wall again, running my fingers into the groove the rock had broken off from. I picked at its jagged edges with my fingernails, and as much as I couldn't believe it, small rock shavings were coming off the wall.

I heard the muffled voice on the other side speak once more, this time directly at me.

Dig, it said.

Dig? Into the stone wall? With what?

I looked around and grabbed the first piece of bone I could see, slamming it against the wall like a makeshift pickaxe. The first two strikes seemed to have no effect on the stone, and on the third, the bone shattered in my hands.

I tried several more pieces with the same result before tentatively approaching Medrion's corpse and carefully removing a piece of his armor. His pauldrons were curved and seemed the perfect shape for digging, but they smashed and crumpled like paper as soon as I hit the wall.

Running out of options, I ran my fingertips along the stony wall again, looking for places to pick at with my nails. I couldn't believe what was happening—parts of the rock face were coming off in little flecks that floated harmlessly to the ground. Curious, I placed my hands against the stone wall, sliding my fingernails into whatever crevices and cracks I could find.

I then pulled, scraping my nails along the rock wall.

Wincing from a sudden bite of pain, I pulled my hands away from the wall. There was blood on my fingertip, a jagged line of broken skin just under my fingernail. I thumbed it off, smearing the blood along my purple-stained finger and continued to dig into the wall.

It shouldn't have been possible for me to remove parts of this cavernous wall with my bare hands, but as I dragged my fingers down the rock, more and more pieces of it were coming off. It was as if the rock was suddenly soft, instead of solid. Not quite like raking my hands through dirt though, it was more like dragging through gravel and broken glass.

I could feel the rock giving way as I bore into it, and that made me start moving faster. After a few moments, I was hacking at the rock with my hands, taking giant pieces out of it and making something that looked like a tunnel. But then I felt pain again, sharp and sudden. I retreated, pulling away from the wall and staring at my hands.

They were bleeding, my hands covered in lacerations that weren't just surface deep. Blood dribbled down my forearms, my nails starting to come up from their beds.

I stared at my bleeding hands, trembling, panting. Shutting my eyes, I channeled some of my Light into the wounds. The warmth soothed the pain, allowing me a moment to recover from it. When I opened my eyes, the cuts were mostly gone and my nails had rejoined the skin, but the blood remained—as did the makings of the tunnel I had just tried to dig into the wall of the Pit.

I had no way of knowing how thick the wall was, no way of knowing how far I would have to dig or if this was going to happen every time I stuck my hands into the wall. What I knew with certainty, though, was that I had just used up more of my remaining Light.

Maybe this was another trick, another way to get me to spend myself so I would end up like the skeletons all around me. I could either resign myself to eventually suffocating, or starving, or dying of dehydration—or worse, none of those things ever happening.

Or I could take my chances with the wall.

Going up isn't an option, I thought to myself.

I'll have to go through.

I moved up against the wall again and considered it carefully; I didn't know how deep I had to go, but I did know how wide it would have to be for me to squeeze myself through—that, at least, would save me some energy and Light.

Seeing as all I had was time, I dug slowly, checking my hands for signs of damage as often as I could. It wasn't easy. Some parts of the wall required more work than others, and those were the ones that left wounds for me to heal.

I couldn't heal them all. Or, I could, but I chose not to.

I chose instead to stand the pain, to work through it instead of using my Light to seal the wounds and stop the bleeding. Wherever this path was taking me, wherever this tunnel I was digging into the wall let out, it was not Heaven. I had a feeling, deep down in the pit of my stomach, that I knew where I was going, and—it wasn't a place I'd ever wanted to step foot in.

But Lucifer was free.

I could only hope Abaddon was still alive.

And I had made a promise to help those lost souls in Heaven, not to mention all the angels trapped on Earth.

I couldn't do that if I was withering away at the bottom of the Pit. Damnation be damned, I was going to get the hell out of this place and fulfill my promises.

"Almost there!" came the voice, much louder and clearer. I hadn't expected them to stick around, but the fact that they did meant perhaps the wall wasn't as thick as I had originally feared. The thought spurred me on, giving me a second wind, and I continued to dig for what felt like hours.

I was bleeding, cut up, and hurt. The pain I was in… I couldn't even have begun to describe. It wasn't just my hands anymore, but my knees, my shoulders, even my wings. There wasn't a part of me that wasn't receiving cuts as I bore my way through the wall of the Pit.

But I couldn't use my Light. Not yet.

Not yet.

Just a little more, Sarakiel.

Those were the words I told myself, the small comfort I had in this dank, dark place. My one last flame of hope. Then it happened. My hand went right through the wall. I almost collapsed right into the wall, and I would have toppled over if I had not been grabbed from the other side and pulled straight through the wall.

I shut my eyes as I pierced what was left of the thin rock, grinning and bearing the biting wounds I took on the way out. I hadn't just been grabbed and pulled, I had been thrown easily ten feet across a hard, stone floor only to land on my shoulder and go tumbling wing over arm.

I came to a stop on my side, gasping for air that—I had hoped—would be easy to breathe. It wasn't. There was still ash in this hot air, even if there was less of it. Opening my eyes, I couldn't make sense of where I was. My vision was blurry, and bright, glowing light smeared itself across what little I could see.

Green light.

It was difficult to make out shapes, but I thought I could see mountains, or hills.

I heard heavy footfalls approach. Instinct pushed my body to move, to roll onto my front so I could pick myself up. My arms were heavy and sluggish, I could barely breathe, and I couldn't see very well—but I could hear.

"Look at that," came a deep, baritone voice. "Finally, another one made it out of the Pit."

A second voice; nasal, and high-pitched. "Been a while since the last one. Looks different though…"

Then a third voice that sounded like the crunching of iron. "Yeah, it's wearing armor," it said, "They ain't supposed to be wearin' armor—what if it's part of an army or something?"

They were little more than dark, humanoid shapes to my blurry eyes. Three of them; two keeping their distance, and one of them approaching. All I could make out was the light from the eyes of the one walking up to me; orange and fiery, the same light that shone out of his throat when he spoke. I knew full well where I was, and whose company I was in.

I heard the ring of metal, then felt the tip of a blade touch the soft underside of my jaw.

"Not an army," said the demon with the knife to my throat—the first one to speak, the one who had pulled me out of the Pit. "But maybe something much, much more interesting."