A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 180: Chapter 180: The Angel of Longing II

The war did not begin with a speech.

A loyal angel ordered the rebels to kneel. One refused. The loyal angel drove a spear of white light straight through his chest, there in the middle of the prayer court, and golden blood hit the marble in a wide arc.

The choir broke mid-note.

Alice had never once, in her whole existence, seen Heaven look like this.

Her first mistake came within seconds.

A loyal angel charged Lucifer’s flank from her right, and Alice reacted before she’d decided to react at all. She threw Longing at him — showed him the one thing he wanted most, Father’s approval, rest, forgiveness, an end to duty that never ended.

He hesitated. One breath, no longer.

A rebel’s blade took him in that breath.

Alice hadn’t swung it. She understood, even then, that she had caused it anyway.

The battle spread through the court like fire through dry grass.

Wings burned white against the gold sky. Gold blood ran down through the frozen prayer threads and set some of them alight. Scrolls of fate scattered loose and caught flame at the edges.

Alice told herself, each time, that she was only stopping a loyal angel from killing a rebel. Each time, someone else finished what her hesitation had started.

She stopped counting how many times that had already happened.

The angel who found her was one she’d known before any of it began.

He was wounded, moving slow, and still gentle even now, even here. He said her old title the way he’d always said it, and then he said the thing that broke her.

”Alice. This is not longing.”

He looked at her a long moment.

”This is hunger.”

The truth of it froze her in place.

Behind him, a rebel died because her hesitation had left an opening for it. She saw the body fall. She heard the prayers still screaming through the burning hall, thousands of them, unanswered, endless.

The loyal angel reached for her — not a weapon, a hand, meant to pull her back from whatever edge he could see she was standing on.

Alice looked at the hand. She looked at the dead rebel behind him.

Something in her chest that had been holding for a very long time finally let go.

She used her authority as command for the first time.

She poured the longing to be forgiven into him until it filled every part of him — not comfort this time, not a dream lent gently in the dark, but command — and twisted it until his weapon fell from his hand on its own, and made him kneel in front of her without ever touching him.

Then she killed him herself.

It was not gory. It was worse than gory, because it was controlled, precise, and entirely hers.

A red-gold vein opened across her white wing where none had been a moment before.

She fought differently after that.

She stopped waiting for rebels to finish what she started. She made angels kneel directly now. She turned memory into a leash. She turned love into something closer to a chain than a gift.

Her holy gift was becoming something else, one choice at a time, and she barely noticed the shape of it changing until it had already changed.

Somewhere above the battlefield, Lucifer fought like a star falling on purpose, beautiful and terrible at once. Michael’s forces pushed the rebel line back meter by meter. Azazel laughed somewhere in the smoke as his forbidden arts spread through the rebels around him.

Alice saw all of it at the edges of her vision and understood none of it mattered as much as what she had just done with her own hands.

The rebellion failed.

Lucifer went first, cast down and burning, dragged out of the broken sky like something torn loose rather than thrown. Alice watched, certain he would look back once at the angels who had stood beside him.

He didn’t.

It didn’t redeem her. It only made her feel abandoned, and more certain than ever that she had already gone too far to turn back toward anything Heaven still recognized as its own.

She ran for the Gate of Mourning.

White-gold, carved along its arch with the names of angels who had never returned from duty, black water running silent beneath the marble bridge that led to it. Her wings were still white at the root, black at the tips, red-gold veins pulsing through every feather now, spreading a little further with every heartbeat.

She was wounded. Half-fallen. Still telling herself, somewhere underneath all of it, that she could explain this if given the chance.

Azrael waited at the gate.

Black wings, folded and still. A face that gave away nothing at all. The scythe resting easy in one hand, like it had always been there and always would be.

No anger in him. No disgust. No satisfaction at catching her.

”You too?” Alice said.

”I was sent.”

That was the whole of it, and it was the thing she hated most about him. He hadn’t come as a friend. He hadn’t come as an enemy, or a judge carrying feelings about what she’d done. He had come as duty, the exact thing she had spent the whole war trying to escape, standing in front of her wearing a face that didn’t care either way.

She attacked first.

She threw everything she had at him — red-gold longing, the faces of every dying human she had ever carried, the wish to rest, the wish to be pitied, the wish to disobey just once and be forgiven for it.

Azrael walked through all of it without slowing.

She tried to make him kneel.

He didn’t.

She came at him with half-black wings and the full weight of what her authority had become. He answered once, the scythe moving a single time.

He did not cut her body first.

He cut her name.

[AUTHORITY OF LONGING — SEVERED]

[DIVINE NAME — REMOVED]

[FALLEN AUTHORITY FORMING]

Everything holy in her collapsed inward at once.

Devotion folded into obsession. Comfort folded into possession. Love folded into hunger, plain and simple, until longing itself became something with teeth.

Her wings blackened fully, root to tip, in the space of one breath. Her halo cracked and fell apart into gold fragments that scattered and dimmed before they hit the ground. Her white robes darkened around every wound until there was no white left in them at all. The red-gold vein that had opened in one wing during the war spread now through every feather she had.

Alice fell from Heaven.

She did not scream Lucifer’s name on the way down.

She screamed Azrael’s.

After the fall, the Seven scattered into creation, and they did not simply kill the worlds they touched.

They poisoned what those worlds meant.

A temple-world stopped praying to God and started praying to Alice’s reflection instead, generation after generation, until no one there remembered the difference. A city fell asleep under red-gold dreams and never fully woke again. Lovers murdered whole families to possess each other cleanly. A king let his own nation starve because he wanted to be worshipped more than he wanted it fed.

Elsewhere, in fragments she caught only at the edges of memory, a world burned under something called Wrath. Another starved under something that called itself hunger and meant it in every sense. Another drowned slowly in envy it never named out loud. Another collapsed in on itself under the weight of its own pride.

Heaven could not kill the Seven cleanly. Their sin had rooted too deep into too many worlds by then, tangled into the very meaning of things.

So Heaven built something else instead.

A grave. A prison. A ladder made from the wreckage of every world they’d already ruined, worlds sealed inside it like wounds that could be reopened but never fully closed.

They called it the Tower.

Alice opened her eyes inside the first chamber built to hold her.

Black marble stretched in every direction. Red-gold chains hung from a ceiling she couldn’t see the top of. Broken prayer threads dangled everywhere, dead and unmoving. A false throne sat at the center of it all, built specifically to mock the office that had once been hers and was hers no longer.

She touched the scar where Azrael had cut her divine name away, feeling for something that wasn’t there anymore and never would be again.

Her wings were fully black now. Her authority whispered faintly through the chains binding her, weak, but alive, and getting stronger the longer she sat with it.

Alice smiled for the first time as the Fallen Angel of Lust.

”Then,” she said, to no one, to everyone, to whatever might still be listening from above, ”let Heaven send him again.”