Asp Necklace of Hell

I could see myself in Samael's arms, him weeping over my blue, barren flesh, frozen to the touch.

But I was too far gone.

Eve had grip of my soul, a pissed off ex-girlfriend who demanded I knew

Who he was:

I remember a time when he Samael not hardened. When the Tree was a hollow husk.

He looked at himself and wept, knowing what he would become. Hell's warden and Judge, the one that children fear and men curse.

In the red morning his brother found him.

"What have you done?" Michael roared. His flaming sword fell from his hands and golden Michael fell to his knees. The archangel's cries filled the sky like thunder. To him, Samael was hideous, unwhole and impure, with a love that had corrupted him. He had stolen heavenly fire and given it to a mortal that shouldn't exist.

He would have killed me, I suppose, if Samael hadn't stopped him.

He didn't lift a finger against Michael. Weak, Samael could not rise, and he dragged himself on his stomach, clawing his way to his twin. He reached for his brother's feet, the ones that had crushed his skull.

Michael backed away, unable to look at Samael. "You have cursed the world," he mourned.

Samael looked at his brother with a blank face. His mouth opened as if begging for water, and a serpent tongue flicked past his lips. He could not form words, but his eyes shone:

Why is this my fate?

Some say Michael has not smiled since. He covered his brother with his cloak, hiding his hideousness, then left him there, alone. Earthquakes rumbled through Eden as Paradise was destroyed. The world was being born, but it was born in fire and blood. The birth pangs claimed Samael as tithe and swallowed him into the pit. Newborn and useless, he could not even hang onto the tree, and for a second time he fell.

In the darkness, he grew strong. I would dream I saw through his ribs, occupied the place of his heart, and that he carried me through the world in his breast. As if I was a yellow, caged canary meant to light the abyss. When night came to the wastelands, I thought it was his cloak that covered the sky.

I imagined many things in those days. Each night, he came to me in dreams, as he is the lord of them. I would have wasted away with yearning, had I not his child to raise.

Yes, his child.

Perhaps one night I strayed from Adamah. In the moonlight I went to the river. Eden was frozen – Samael had cast me out, and Adam and I – we were dying. I bathed, and in the reflection I saw the woman I had become. I floated on my back down the current, willing it to take me to the land of the dead, and rounded a bend in the river.

A gnarled tree clawed at the sky, hanging over the water like a widow. I saw a thick root wrapped around it and thought it a monstrous vine. But the root constricted around the trunk. It was the body of a monstrous snake. I stood speechless as he descended from the canopy, immaculate as before above the waist, still pale as the moon, but below that, now a monster. The wound I had given him was still fresh, and his eyes now glowed red like death. Their color before, like wine, was reddened in sorrow, as if he had cried so much the iris bore scars.

His face was the same. Though cruel, he was beautiful. I tried to give him back his heart. He would not take it. He said I must bear the light, and that the flower within me was ready to bear fruit. I asked him what I carried within me, and he said that it was an idea.

Bitterly, he told me what he had become.

"I will love you no matter what you are," I said. His eyes quieted to the color of purple wine. I meant it, and I still do. If he is Fenrir or the Dragon, I will be beside him until the end.

He asked me an impossible thing.

"Promise me you'll come back," he begged. "You cannot die, Havah. Somehow, come back for me, when the light has left your eyes. Do not – you can't… do not leave me alone."

We had one night. It was enough for a lifetime. In the morning he vanished, like a dream.

If you love something, you let it go. I flew like a butterfly from his hands.

That is why he loves them, souls.

Because they are all he wants and can never have.

He tried to hold me. I slipped through his fingers like sand.