Fic (sort of): Avalon, PG; Gabriel, various angels
Avalon
Warnings: Confusing near-meta, science given precedence over religion, made-up terminology, angels travelling at light speed, lots and lots of talking and almost zero plot/action. Also language? Eventually.
Summary: Gabriel visits the material plane and spreads some funky new ideas among the Host. Then he leaves, and things get weird.
Notes!: I wrote most of this in a few hours for some reason. I started it thinking ‘la la prehistoric!Gabriel! Whee!’ and then it turned into…I don’t know. Something else about free will and consciousness.
I probably (certainly) got some stuff wrong on the history of the SPN-verse version of Lucifer’s history, and the religious stuff in general, but I’m not too stressed about that. Just assume stuff is going on in the background that Gabriel didn’t observe, so it didn’t make it into the story.
On the science front, if I got any dates wrong, let me know--I was gathering the info on the fly so I may need to fix some things.
This is seriously not intended to be commentary on any religion, ever (even less than SPN is) so I take a lot of liberties with the ideas of free will and hell and the devil and all that because it tends to change depending on which religion you’re reading at the time (and who’s doing the commentary). Think of this as weird science fiction and the angels as beings occupying a different plane of existence, because that’s how I’m thinking of them. I really genuinely have zero interest in ‘sin’ or judgment or any of that.
Title is from the Avalon Explosion, which is a cool name.
Avalon
Ediacaran period, c.a. 655 m.y.a
Gabriel is immense, and despite lacking material form the angel still somehow manages to feel uncomfortable crammed into its tiny, tiny borrowed body. Nevertheless, the angel and the spriggina make a fine spectacle as they cut through the sea together, past the multitude of soft-bodied, immobile life forms dotting the ocean floor. The creature Gabriel is borrowing has no mind to speak of, and its perceptions of the world are simplistic at best, but it possesses a fair few senses that fascinate the angel, not least of which are clusters of cells that perceive certain types of electromagnetic radiation--light. These senses are the primary reason the angel has weaseled its way out of its current responsibilities and is playing hooky on Earth. Other angels find the senses of material life forms primitive, tedious, even obscene. Gabriel finds them enticing, for reasons it has not yet managed to parse.
The angel, in its true form, has no need for the primitive senses the Earth life forms rely upon for their survival. Gabriel, being a creature whose existence--and sentience--depends on the fluctuating structures and interactions of individually sentient waveparticle matrices, is essentially directly connected to the ebb and flow of electromagnetic radiation that suffuses much of the universe. Gabriel’s siblings think nothing of their easy perception of all of creation, the way reality flows and threads through their bodies and beings, and elicits responses in both their conscious and unconscious minds. Indeed, they are barely capable of consciousness, Gabriel often finds itself thinking traitorously, because they are only capable of reacting to stimuli in entirely correct and appropriate ways. To do otherwise would be…un-angelic.
Gabriel has never found another sibling among the Host with even the slightest interest in the damp, squirming, procreating, matter-consuming, quickening and dying (dying!) life forms that have asserted themselves in the material portion of the universe. The angel finds this both a desperately sad state of affairs, and also a strangely intoxicating one. Never in nearly thirteen billion years has an angel willingly detached itself from the Host to explore the crudest of all planes of existence. Yet for some reason, Gabriel finds itself drawn back to Earth again and again. Certainly the senses are a part of the reason for this interest. Gabriel has not yet determined the reason for its fascination. Why, it often wonders, would it willingly seek to dampen its own sense of connection with the universe, and to perceive reality in such a slow and limited manner? And yet it does so, and has down so multiple times.
Gabriel uses its host’s segmented body--a limited, self-contained structure sustained through ingestion and incorporation of other such structures--to propel itself through the water. The angel uses the perception of ‘sight’--the ability to detect certain types of electromagnetic radiation--to gain knowledge of the immediate surroundings. The angel knows that no other angel so far is aware that material life has evolved the ability to perceive light. The very foundation of angelic existence, their integrated bodyminds nestled within the fabric of the universe, is electromagnetic radiation. The idea that a material life form, a matter-body, could somehow sense the body of an angel, would very probably alarm the Host, at best, and disgust it at worst. Gabriel has known about sight for some thousands of millions of years, since the first light-sensitive cells evolved. It has not spoken of the sense to anyone, and with, it thinks, good reason.
It feels a certain fondness in the deeper, more hidden recesses of its being for these implausible matter-body-forms.
The ocean is dim, but relatively shallow. It reminds Gabriel of its home, the humming singing not-void, pregnant with the vibrations of angels, fluid and enmeshed, ever changing but always the same. Yet the Host does not serve as residence to any other life forms, either matter or energy, or any combination of the two. Here in this cold dark place, however, are a plethora of living beings. Matter-beings, some with the ability to ‘see’ or ‘smell’ or even ‘hear’, many with the ability to sense contact with other material forms--to ‘touch.’ The angel peers about with its borrowed eyes. It tastes the cold water flowing through its borrowed body. It cannot resist a shiver of delight, despite the unnaturalness of the gesture for the spriggina. The limitations of the matter-form’s senses are somehow not confining, as they should be, but thrilling.
Angels have no sight. Angels need no sight. All information passes through them, physically. They are barely able to understand the distinction between their own bodyselves and the living, thrumming pulse of the universe.
Gabriel is far too large for this borrowed body. Its senses are too vast to be accurately called senses, and are in no way analogous to the crude, simplistic tools this tiny creature has evolved to help it navigate the matter-world. Yet here, in this dim cold place, crammed into a form as different from itself as any creature in thirteen billion years has ever been, the angel realizes that the primitive senses, the vast gap in awareness, and the necessary delineation between ‘within’ and ‘without,’ are fraught with a terrible significance. Gabriel cannot yet grasp what the significance is. Only it knows that among all the angels, it will be the first to understand, and when it does, nothing will ever be the same.
With that knowledge heavy inside its spatial metric, the angel flips the tail of its host and swims onward into the as-yet nameless sea.
Early Devonian period, c.a. 417 m.y.a
Angels don’t name things. The names of things are simply what they are.
Gabriel is standing on the beach with his younger brother. His brother is very new, and relatively small. He’s a bit strange, for an angel, and frankly Gabriel sees a little more of himself in the…child…than he would really like. He keeps those thoughts to himself, however.
The angels are currently bodiless, and not meant to be present in the material plane at all, as their oscillating energetic bodyforms distort the landscape around them, melting the sand to glass and superheating the air above them. Gabriel is meant to be instructing his younger brother in some of the more esoteric songs of praise, the ones felt and described some eight hundred million years ago in the cradle of some extinct nebula by one of their more obscure siblings. Yet Castiel has never shown much affinity for music, despite being a being formed out of vibrations, and Gabriel supposes this has something to do with the nature of the new generation. Castiel is strangely inclined towards hands-on activities, which is unfortunate as angels have no hands.
Nevertheless, Gabriel has felt moved to declare a recess, a short break to his favorite getaway spot, after swearing his younger sibling to silence. Castiel took the oath as he takes all things: solemnly.
They are watching a tiktaalik. It is a fish. Gabriel has seen many fish; indeed, he has been many fish. Of course this is his little secret, but even now his body hums with the memory of the weight of flesh, of possession of bones. He doesn’t dare try to describe it. But the knowledge fills his being and beside him, Castiel shifts. Gabriel has considered, on more than one occasion, that his forays into the material plane may have had some unintended side-effects on the Host as an enmeshed unit. Perhaps his knowledge has threaded its way through the shared subconscious strata of the angelic Host. It would certainly go a long way to accounting for the peculiarity of the new generation, those angels like Castiel and Sariel. They’re a strange breed, and Gabriel occasionally worries what they may come to in the end. The sudden appearance of gender-assignments is likely to be the minimum of the fallout.
He tells his brother not to step on the fish. Not in so many words, of course, because as they are angels they don’t have feet, or vocal cords. But Castiel has wandered too close and the scream that is his wavebody interacting with the background noise of the universe has increased with his interest. At Gabriel’s injunction he retreats, however, and hovers at a distance safe enough to allow him to observe the small matter-form without potentially boiling the water out of which it is currently poking it’s somewhat slimy head.
:What is it?: Castiel asks, and Gabriel winces. Another hallmark of this newer generation is an unfortunate tendency to ask questions. Angels don’t ask questions. Angels know reality, innately, at its root.
:It’s a fish: Gabriel jokes, hoping that’s the end of the issues, but his brother is not to be satisfied.
:I mean: Castiel presses :What kind of fish is it? What is it called? What is its name?:
And Gabriel has no answer for him. He cannot say ‘it is called fish’ because within its bodyform is its identity, and surely Castiel can perceive that. Castiel can perceive everything about this small life form, simply by turning his consciousness in its direction. Gabriel suspects it’s not actually the name that his brother is asking for.
To name a thing is to divide it, to separate the universe into parts. Castiel, Gabriel realizes slowly, is asking something no angel has ever asked. :What is this thing that is separate from the universe? What is this thing I see that exists within itself?:
Gabriel wishes he had eyes so that he could cut them away from his brother, and could fix his gaze anywhere else on the landscape. But at the very least he can perceive the flow of time around them, and forty-three million years from where they’re standing, an extinction event is threatening. It blows a cold breath over the surface of his bodyform. If he had skin, it would shiver.
:Why don’t we go home: Gabriel suggests, extending himself towards his younger charge in a manner that he hopes is friendly. :There’s a storm coming. We don’t want to be here when it hits.:
Castiel turns his consciousness toward his brother, and grumbles. But he acquiesces, and together they wipe all evidence of their presence from the air, the land, the water, before altering their frequencies and slipping back into the home of the Host. It’s only because Gabriel is watching for it that he sees Castiel peer back into the matter-world, confusion etched into his energy state.
Gabriel doesn’t say anything, because at this point he’s almost certain that it’s all his fault.
Devonian extinction, c.a. 374 m.y.a.
Gabriel cuts himself off from the Host, the first time in history any angel has done so. They wail outside his self-imposed exile, throw themselves bodily against the void with which he’s surrounded himself. Their pain is genuine, and it tears at him. Yet nothing cuts as deeply as the waves of death sweeping the surface of the earth. It lasts for millions of years. Gabriel draw in on himself. His shape compresses. Energy barely flows through him. His waveparticles vibrate weakly.
Some cease to vibrate at all.
How can they ever recover? He wonders, and doesn’t dare to look into the future, for fear of the darkness he will surely see there.
Mesozoic (Jurassic), c.a. 180 m.y.a.
There’s self-awareness as angels have always understood it, and then there’s this. This other thing, which has no name, and which has left the angels entirely gobsmacked. Gabriel kind of wants to execute some kind of ‘I told you so’ dance, which could be difficult because the only animals that dance right now are some of the amphibians and a few dinosaurs, and mostly only when sex is a possibility. He refrains, but he definitely has the urge.
“Look,” he tries to explain, drifting along amongst the clouds with Raphael, “It’s not complicated. They aren’t part of a Host. At all. They just have no Host. Okay? Can you try to comprehend this? I mean can you make an effort?”
Raphael glowers, as much as an angel with no face can. He’s irritated because he feels himself behind the learning curve, and doesn’t like it. He’s always been one of the quickest of the elder siblings, and that’s at least part of the reason why Gabriel’s always gotten on well with him.
“Don’t speak to me as if I’m an infant, Gabriel.”
“Then listen to me when I talk! Okay? So look,” he makes to gesture at the ground below, realizes he has no arms, and tries to sort of impress on his brother the need to direct his awareness toward the earth. Raphael obliges, grumpily. A herd of Dilong, their feathers glossy in the sun, stream along the valley floor. The land is green and rich, the air heavy and humid. Ferns and confers dominate the landscape. It seems far removed from the chilly depths of the seas Gabriel once happily roamed in the bodies of his borrowed hosts. The other angels, he knows, are unable to really grasp the connection between the two seemingly unrelated settings.
He tries to explain: “They don’t perceive most of the universe, Raphael. They can’t perceive anything beyond the information immediately available to their senses. And their senses rely on matter. The formation of matter--you know this. On cells and their ability to collect input, and on other cells that make up nerve centers and brains and things like that, to construct a model of reality that they perceive. They don’t see the world, they see the model of it that they build in their heads and bodies.”
“I know all this,” Raphael grunts, and rolls over onto his immense back. There are creatures in the sea, Gabriel knows, that are quite significantly larger than his tiny spriggina host from millions of years back, yet even they would flee if confronted with Raphael’s enormous bulk. His massive ‘body,’ of course, is more an expression of his immense power than anything related to physical ‘size,’ but here in this matterform plane it’s the easiest way to conceptualize him. Raphael is currently the largest thing on the planet that isn’t a natural geologic formation.
“You know it cerebrally, but you don’t really grasp it internally, within your lightform matrix,” Gabriel says patiently. “Look again.”
Raphael doesn’t actually have to roll over to direct his attention to the surface of the earth, and so he doesn’t. Instead he extends his awareness, feeling out the threads of reality around them, in a way only an angel can. Gabriel sighs.
“There are no other creatures like us,” he says, “in all creation. Yet here we find analogues. Creatures who interact with their environment, who came about this ability by necessity, rather than design. Isn’t that amazing? And they can see us, you know, if they look up. They have eyes. They can see light.”
“And what of it?” Raphael snaps.
“So much of the world is hidden from them. You might even call them blind. Yet in this blindness they develop something else. They can’t know the true shape of the universe. They can’t feel it vibrate through them. They have something we don’t. They have this ability we don’t.”
Despite himself, Raphael is interested.
“And what is that, this thing the possess that we lack?”
Gabriel remembers. Remembers his thoughts about consciousness. About how angels are necessarily embedded in the fabric of the universe. About how the shifting currents of reality define them, guide them, create within them thoughts and feelings, without their ever needing to consider either their source or their meaning.
“They have choice, Raphael. They must choose, their every action, every breath, every heartbeat, is a kind of choosing. A finite reality out of an infinite field of possibilities. They can’t feel the heartbeat of the universe, they can only feel their own. They have consciousness because they have to choose in order to survive. Raphael, these crude and simple creatures have free will.”
He looks at his brother, flush with the excitement of this knowledge, this understanding. But he sees, by Raphael’s confusion, that his brother does not understand. That perhaps he cannot understand.
“The choices they make are the choices they must make,” Raphael rumbles, like a storm cloud. He is not angry. Yet. “The choices are shaped by the changes in the future and the collected events of the past. They can only ever make the choice that is available to them, and it is always one choice.”
“Maybe,” Gabriel says, and he’d shrug his shoulders if he had any. “From our perspective it might look that way. But they don’t have that perspective. So from where they’re standing, the choices they make require some kind of active engagement. They have no guide, no deeper awareness, in the way that we do. Everything they do is necessarily a choice.”
“There’s only one universe,” Raphael counters irritably. “And so there can only be one choice.”
Gabriel looks at his brother for a long, long time. Then he looks down at the verdant earth, the forests and fields, the enormous reptilian life forms. Descendants of the creatures that survived the mass extinctions.
He can’t help but think that it must mean something.
Pleistocene (Toba catastrophe), c.a. 73,000 y.a.
Lucifer falls and takes most of the human race with him.
The Lake Toba supervolcano might have erupted anyway, it’s impossible for anyone to say. But Lucifer forcing his way out of the Host’s plane of existence, slaughtering countless troops in the process, and punching a hole into the material plane, sends shockwaves racing around the earth and forces critical amounts of magma into the volcano’s chamber. The explosion is massive, the fallout deadly.
South Asia is blanketed in fifteen centimeters of ash. The Indian Ocean is covered, along with the Arabian and China Seas. The entire earth cools. The death toll is catastrophic.
Gabriel watches people die. He’s been inhabiting the same host for a thousand years, moving from place to place, sometimes spending decades in the wilderness, alone. He fled the Host when the conflicts became unbearable, and now he wonders, as he sits by a mud-clogged valley and watches the ash, tiny particles of rocks and glass, rain down on the once-green land, if things might have gone differently had he stayed and fought.
It’s not fair, he thinks, in despair. Dinosaurs lived for 160 million years, and mankind didn’t even break the half-million mark.
He gets to his feet, vibrates his matrix and flicks the ash off his host. Hurls himself across the face of the planet even as angels follow Lucifer into the material plane and drag him, shrieking, into some other dark and terrible void. He hears the words, Abyss, Hell, Gehinnom. The words mean nothing, they belong to some future time and place. But the thunder of cast-out angels batters his awareness, as brothers and sisters, some older than Gabriel, some young and impressionable, are hurled into the dark.
And here on earth the human race is dying. He flies from encampment to migration route, across mountains, through valleys, over the oceans. Death rains from the skies. Those that survive the initial eruption die in the following months, drowning on dry land as particles settle in their lungs.
Both of Gabriel’s worlds are collapsing. He abandons his Host in grief and fury, and flings himself into the cosmos. In a few hours he’s crossing the edge of the solar system.
In a year, he’s reached the nearest star.
Holocene (early Pre-Atlantic ) c.a. 8,000 y.a.
He always forgets about the height thing. Just when he feels like he’s got a new vessel broken in, it’s two thousand years later and everyone’s grown a foot and a half. It’s getting ridiculous, and he’s a little tired of being the shortest guy on the continent, no matter where he actually happens to be.
Genetic diversity isn’t doing him any favors either. Currently he’s stuck in a guy who’s genetically adapted to survive in chilly northern climates, with hair that’s sort of straw-colored, and pale eyes. It’s not a very useful body because most of the human population doesn’t look like him, and if he takes it into his head to travel…anyplace outside the rather small area pale, straw-haired people are confined to, he tends to attract attention. Not that he can’t smite whoever gets in his way, but that’s hardly the point. If he starts throwing his angelic powers around, anyway, somebody’s going to notice Up There. (And it’s a comment on how long he’s been in the material plane that he’s picked up the local vernacular regarding the celestial plane. As if angels are literally lounging around on clouds. It’s a surreal bit of cognitive dissonance.)
Right now he’s sitting in some market he’s forgotten the name of, surrounded by a babble of voices and a crowd of people who are all about half an inch taller than him--even the women. He’s forgotten to keep track of the rise and fall of civilizations in the past two hundred years again, but he’s not too distressed by this. Civilizations, kingdoms and dynasties come and go in the blink of an eye.
There’s a girl watching him from across the street. She’s too young to be marriageable, and her feet are bare. Her eyes are the color of dead stones. Gabriel sits by the well and watches her. He doesn’t like the look of her face. Or rather, of what’s behind it.
He’s seen monsters, the kind that prey almost exclusively on humans. He knows they exist, that they’ve existed for some time. Since before the fall of Lucifer, at least. Most were given life at some point in those long years when mankind became more than simply extra-clever apes, while others came into being long before that. Some monsters are no more than exquisitely rare animals, albeit animals without an evolutionary history. Others are more complex, mixtures of human and ancient, alien horrors. Some bear the imprints of creatures from the deepest depths of time, the hundred million years of darkness. Gabriel knows of them, at least, though he’s never seen their faces.
But he doesn’t think the girl looking at him is something that ancient. Instead, he suspects she’s something very, very new.
The crowds move around them and the air smells of humans, animals, sweat and feces and dust and dry air, spices and blood, and deep water.
The girl steps forward through the throng. Her bare feet leave tiny footprints in the dust, obliterated as quickly as they’re made by the larger bodies around her. She pays them no heed.
She has a water jug under her arm, carved out of a gourd. Gabriel watches as she carefully dips the water out of the well and fills the jug until it’s full. She doesn’t spill a drop.
Only then does she look at him. Her eyes are inhuman, but not inhuman enough.
The angel leans forward, clasping his hands between his knees.
“What happened to you?” he wonders aloud. The girl smiles. Behind her face are screams and agonies. Gabriel narrows his eyes (he’s learned how to do that).
“I’m first,” she announces, a note of adult pride in her little-girl voice.
“First what?”
“First as you were first, in this place. He told me.”
He leans forward. There’s tension in his body, his borrowed flesh. He’s learned how to do that too--how to live in and fully inhabit this body. No longer does he feel his true form pressing uncomfortably against the walls of matter. This body is more than a puppet.
“Who told you, little girl?”
She sniffs disdainfully, and draws herself up fully. “My name isn’t ‘little girl,’’ she sneers. “It’s Lilith.”
Gabriel snaps upright. “That’s not a name, it’s a type of monster.”
Lilitu are creatures that live in the wilderness. Gabriel knows; he’s met some.
“It’s a new name, one He made just for me.” She talks in a lilting, singsong voice, a cloying imitation of a child’s tones. It’s aggravating.
“Who did?” he grinds out. He resists the urge to reach out and shake her.
“My Lord. My God. My creator. Don’t you know him? The brightest and most beautiful of all?”
Gabriel says, “Oh.” He can’t quite keep the scorn out of his voice.
The Lilith-thing glowers at him.
“He’s going to save the world!”
“Really?” Gabriel crosses his arms. “And how’s he going to do that?” His voice sounds more than a bit patronizing, and he can’t bring himself to care. He kind of wishes he had a dolly to wave in front of her face, just to see what color it would turn. He’s betting on some shade of dark purple.
She giggles. It’s horrible. And she executes some kind of pirouette and flutters her lashes, and her eyes are as dark as the void.
“Wouldn’t you like to know!” she trills, and makes to launch herself away from him. Not physically, Gabriel sees in shock, but trans-dimensionally, her true, hidden self spreading wide and vibrating, oscillating, like an angel’s form. Darkness momentarily shrouds the world and Gabriel leaps to his feet.
“No!” he squawks, and lashes one hand and a good chunk of his lightbody in her direction, grabbing on and preventing her flight. Around them, the crowd freezes as time grinds to a halt. The monster in the girl’s body looks up at him, blinking owlishly.
“You don’t get to do that!” Gabriel bites out. “Nothing born in this plane of existence can do that!”
“He made me,” Lilith says pleasantly. “I can do so many things.”
Her eyes are black. The eyes of the host covered in darkness. A veil, he thinks, and then tilts his head and no, it's a void, a hole dug out of the world.
“You,” Gabriel whispers, “Can you even see?”
Her eyes snap to brown and she snarls. It’s inhuman and twists the face below the skin. Gabriel hisses and jerks his hand away. He’s touched something filthy, something corrupted.
With a shudder of energies he can’t even describe, the creature is gone. Gabriel flexes the fingers of his hand and resists the urge to wipe it on his tunic.
“Well,” he mutters, “Shit.”
--
He doesn’t go after her. In the end, he stays where he’s been for the past few weeks, kicking around the town, listening to the local dialects and parsing out which elements he’s encountered elsewhere in his travels. He doesn’t know, yet, what the coming of the new creature heralds, or if the ‘Lord’ she’d spoken of is who he thinks it is. He knows at some point he’s going to want to collect more information, but nothing seems very urgent right now. His concept of time, it seems, has shrunk somewhat, and he finds himself measuring it not in millennia but in heartbeats, in each individual breath that he takes. It should be strange, it should be frightening. Gabriel knows he’s changed irrevocably from the being he once was, a fact which by itself should upend the entirety of creation. Angels aren’t meant to change, or adapt. They aren’t meant to look at the world as something external from themselves. It isn’t in their nature.
He goes back to the well and sits beside it, on the ground, in the dust. He watches the crowds pass by, listens to their voices, inhales the odor of the market. He suffers the occasional jostling with patience. He savors the senses of his host, his body. The mind inside has long ago shriveled away, and Gabriel is alone within the flesh. It should be terrifying. It should be agonizing. This sense of division, of categorization, of internal and external. Yet it’s not. Somehow, in nearly seven hundred million years, Gabriel the angel has got used to the idea.
He watches the women and men and children and animals pass by. He remembers a distant sea, the feeling of cold water flowing around and through the borrowed body of the tiny life form. He remembers the light, diffusing through the currents, and how marvelous it had been to see it, to understand the world in a new and different way. He inhales deeply and the air is dry, and tastes of dust, but on his tongue the angel can feel cool, cool water.
-The End-
___________________________________________
Other Notes:
Everyone should read Flatland! Dimensions are fun!
I wrote 3700 words yesterday in four hours, including the time I stopped writing in order to look up various terms and timeframes and Lucifer-stuff. When I woke up this morning my hands literally ached. So given how quickly this was written, it’s obv. not meant to be that great. But it happened, and it’s done, so I’m posting it as is. There’s really nothing much else to be done with it.
M theory
Toba catastrophe theory
Holocene
Click to view...there's this tremendous mess of waves all over in space, which is the light bouncing around the room...