But
all I ask of you, my angel,
is your prayer for me*
—One
night, Roselle was walking aimlessly in the palace garden because of too much mental pressure from work. The palace of Intis was empty and everyone had gone home after work. At this time, he heard the clear voice of a girl coming from the pavilion in the corner of the garden.
"Adam." The voice said this, as if calling someone who was once quite close. Russell was almost frightened by the voice. Hey, it is forbidden to call the name of Voldemort here! Russell wanted to see which outlaw was making trouble here, but saw a blonde girl in a white simple linen robe sitting on the top of the pavilion. What kind of retro dress is this? She looks like a figure in a mural unearthed in the Glorious Era... Russell muttered in his heart. The girl stood up from the pavilion lightly and stood on the highest spire on tiptoe. The rough stone cut her soles, and blood flowed down. She just looked at the direction where the moon was moving and called out aimlessly.
"Adam, Adam. I know you can hear me. You are not like your father before, who occasionally sleeps to maintain certain human habits. You just don't want to pay attention to me, right? The night can deceive Amon, Medici, and Ouroboros, but it can't deceive you. You can obviously tell them where I am, but why do you always choose to remain silent?" The girl's words seemed to be accusing, but her tone was light, as if there was no emotional fluctuation. Perhaps after making thousands of futile attempts, Sisyphus also gave up the necessary emotions, otherwise how could he continue to live in lies and deception?
Roselle was shocked by the amount of information in this passage. So what was the relationship between this girl who claimed to be from the Fourth Epoch and Adam and those great figures who only existed in the church scriptures? At this time, the girl noticed his gaze, turned around and smiled at him, so he suddenly forgot his purpose and left to the other end of the palace involuntarily.
The next day, after having a beautiful dream as peaceful as a windless afternoon, he had forgotten everything he had heard.
Perhaps some people doubted the identity of Athena, the so-called "third daughter of Duke Amon", not only because of her abrupt blonde hair, but also because she was too bold and reckless compared to her brothers and sisters. She always pestered Adam, and Medici or Ouroboros followed her wherever she went, as if these two angel kings were her followers. She also always wandered around in Solomon's palace, and once she even teleported herself to the main hall where a meeting was being held when she was half asleep, and hit Medici right in the face.
"Aren't you a visionary like Adam?" Bethel once asked her doubtfully, "but you seem to be able to use some of the authority of the 'Door'." But if you look closely, you will find that Mr. 'Door', who is known for his elegance, does not look confused at all, as if he is aware of everything that is unreasonable about Athena.
Haha, because I was once the Star Key, one of the nine angels under the Lord. Haven't you heard of the famous Star Angels? Athena shouted in her heart. But she didn't want to be exposed for the time being, so she took out the jewel-studded and exaggerated notebook she carried with her and said in a sincere tone: "Have you seen this notebook my father gave me? It is a traveler's extraordinary characteristics, so it is very reasonable for me to use some of the abilities of the 'Gate'!" Although it still looked suspicious, Bethel didn't bother to ask any more questions.
The bigwigs of Solomon's Empire all knew that there were some mysteries surrounding this girl, but the Lord's agents always kept it a secret.
"Adam, are you going to that Tudor again?" Athena lay on the blond priest's lap in an ungraceful manner, looking as wanton as a witch. Adam did not push her away, but at this moment several black crows suddenly flew in, picked her up from Adam's legs by her hair.
"Hey, it hurts! Amon, do you have any disease?" Athena had to sit up and pull her hair back from the crow's mouth, pulling out several strands of hair, which made her grimacing with anger.
"If you go to that Tudor, take me with you." Athena said to Adam, I really want to see him, but it would be too rude to break into his house without an invitation. Adam just smiled and didn't ask anything.
"Cack!" the crow cried loudly. Athena saw that he wanted to ask why, probably why he was interested in that guy. She just said it like a riddler, because in the darkest corner of my heart, there is a statue of sky blue and gold*. The crow was very dissatisfied with her inexplicable pretense and pecked her several times. She grabbed the crow and plucked its feathers desperately. The scene in the church suddenly became very chaotic.
She was interested in Alistair Tudor not because of his contemptuous words to her when they met that day. After all, she was not a masochist. She was very vindictive and planned to write in her little notebook when she returned, "Alistair choked while eating today and no one around brought him water. This is very reasonable." But she was indeed interested in him because of Tudor's inexplicable hostility. She always felt that there was something inside that she didn't know. It seemed that with the good fortune of Ouroboros, she soon got the secret without any effort.
After the death of the Star Angel, the True Creator led his men to build a church for her in the newly built city-state. Most buildings in the Fourth Epoch were black, but the church was pure white. However, the building did not give people a pure sense of holiness. It looked slender, and it gave people a sense of crampedness. The sharp blade-like spire pointed directly to the sky.
Since her fall, Athena has been like Amon, with few real believers left. Perhaps she had many believers before her fall. After all, she was once the most willful daughter of the Lord, and a dual path of dreamers and gates. The angel king of the gate path had more power than any angel under the Lord. But since the news of her fall at the end of the Glorious Era spread, after thousands of years, her believers have long been gone. However, she has now been stripped of her angel position due to the competition of various forces, and does not need too many anchors to stabilize her spirit.
One night, Athena was sleeping like a human, when she suddenly heard a series of faint calls. She heard a familiar male voice calling her by the name she had used before. "You are the shadow of order and reason, you are the dream of chaos and madness..." Wait, who is praying in the middle of the night, and it's so corny! Athena jumped up from the bed and slid directly to her own church.
In that empty church, she saw the man with long brown hair kneeling on one knee in front of the altar, reciting her former honorific name. Although his movements were pious, the paranoia in his eyes had penetrated the dull air like a substance.
He didn't look like a god begging for his favor, but he hoped to catch her whereabouts, get her, and possess her. Even if she disappeared again, she could only disappear in his arms. As a psychoanalyst, Athena understood these emotions very well, but why was she still fascinated by his crazy and cold face? His blue eyes sparkled in the moonlight projected from the church's stained windows, like the glittering scales of a venomous snake. No one could refuse a venomous snake with fanatical love, just like no one could refuse the blade behind a beautiful lie.
After that, Athena often followed Adam in and out of Tudor's mansion. She formally met the Duke of Entropy for the first time, and saluted him elegantly, but her gray eyes boldly looked him up and down, which seemed very impolite. But when she didn't know, Alistair was also silently looking at him.
On a midsummer afternoon, Adam was tripped up by some affairs, and she came to Tudor's mansion alone. "Adam asked me to do your psychological treatment today on his behalf." She smiled at him cunningly. They sat opposite each other in a room filled with fine dust. Alistair suddenly approached her face, his eyes sharp, as if he wanted to shoot poisonous arrows to pierce her. He stared at her face, which was too similar to the statue of the star angel in the church. "Athena." He pronounced her name as if he was reciting a prophecy. "Did they give you this name because you look too much like her?" He seemed to be looking through the girl in front of him at a great being who had long since died.
She said nothing at that time, but stepped forward and kissed his harsh and cold lips. For some reason, Alistair did not push her away, but pressed the back of her head to deepen the kiss.
He looked at the angel in his heart, like a pale sculpture that did not exist in the world. If he pierced her heart with a dagger, what would flow out would only be a river of glass that would pierce people all over. Alistair stroked her thin face, and with a little force, he cut a small wound under her gray pupils. The bright red blood dripped onto his face like a burning tear.
Would gods also shed tears for their believers? Perhaps this was some kind of supreme reward. Athena's cold and soft hands plunged into his brown hair like a mercury arrow, her golden eyelashes trembled, and her neck was weakly bent in the midsummer dust. How to dye the angel's holy face with the delicate lust of a bright red flower splashing its juice when it was beheaded, with aphrodisiac or poison?
In that desolate afternoon with no sound of anyone, he smelled the mixed scent of night-blooming osmanthus and heliotrope, seeping out from her trembling soft chest, and the winding golden hair on the bed was like a stream of divine blood.
"Ali, why isn't your hair red?" When they were in bed together, Athena always stroked his hair and asked him like an innocent child. God's blood is golden, so my hair is golden. Your blood is red, so your hair should be as red as the blood flowing from the depths of the heart of the lovers who died for love. That way we will be a match. She just thought so naively. As for Amon's black hair, it was because the body of that hateful crow only oozes rotten sewage.
"So do you like Medici?" Alistair didn't care much about this sentence that seemed to indicate that his lover was unfaithful. He was sure that the girl in front of him would always belong to him, because he saw the decadence and infatuation in her eyes. But why was he still inexplicably uneasy?
"I just like red. Whether it's blood, the mucous membrane you see when you close your eyes, or the crimson moon." Athena just smiled at the time and did not explain the meaning of her words.
During a casual afternoon chat, Russell asked curiously, "Hey, how come you know so much about Tudor's beliefs? Do you have a good relationship with him? Most people wouldn't know this."
"Because at that time," the blonde girl smiled mysteriously, "I heard him praying to me... no, to that mysterious being." She was not at all flustered, and easily deleted the word "I" that she accidentally blurted out from Roselle's memory.On the stage, the devil, the dragon, and the god of love
are still jumping and clamoring.
But He has already left the theater
and is going home to change his clothes.
---
Amon didn't feel that he had lost control at first. Yes, that's how it should be. Nothing had gone in a direction that he couldn't control. Everything should be within the arrangement of his happy house game. But my dear angel of time, have you ever thought about it? Have you ever thought about it? The sweet and elusive voice of the girl sounded in his deepest dream. When you find that things are a little out of control, it's like you found a small termite at the bottom of the wall. It looks insignificant and easy to ignore, but soon, they will invade every gap. When you find it, bang! The girl snapped her fingers lightly, and the building was about to collapse!
Speaking of which, Amon hated that dream. He didn't sleep much, but he always dreamed about it repeatedly during the occasional naps when he was bored. Could it be that the golden dragon controlled his dreams? He touched the sunken eye sockets where the monocle was missing and pondered. However, in the long Third Age, she had never entered his dreams. She often went to Medici's dreams to scare him. The angel in charge of war seemed to be very afraid of ghosts, but the ghost stories created by Athena in his dreams were always particularly realistic. Amanisis told me! She told Medici proudly that he said that once she told these stories, Antigonus would no longer bother her.
Poor Antigonus... Every time Medici heard her talk about this, he suddenly felt much more balanced. No, what was there for him to be balanced about! He had been tortured into a masochist by that little snake and that crow!
"Because I hate Amon, I would rather soak my brain in the River of Eternal Darkness than experience your spiritual world at all!" The thoughts that Amon stole from the Star Angel's mind were nothing more than this. Amon suspected that she had known about his theft for a long time, so he filled her mind with "I hate crows, crows die, crows are the most tasteless things in the world", otherwise he would have heard some other thoughts, such as her obvious special feelings for the night, or why she was always obsessed with teasing Medici?
She liked to stay with the night and Ouroboros most of the time. Amon didn't think she had any special interest in Medici. She was an overly noisy child. If she stayed with another noisy guy, it would only lead to a series of chaotic farces in the Lord's Kingdom.
When they were still teenagers in terms of age, her father had given her a pen of Alesuhod offered by God as a toy. She picked it up without thinking and handed it to Adam, because he was more of a dreamer than she was, but her father shook his head slightly to show his disapproval. She liked to write in that notebook. The original plain and yellowed book had been hopelessly inlaid with various precious gems, like a father who loved his child too much and put all twelve beautiful clothes on her. She pinned the pen on the spine of the book. The pen wanted to play freely, but it had to be as quiet as a chicken in front of the strongest angel king of the Third Age. Athena took the pen and wrote many boring stories. She seemed to like to arrange for Amon and Medici to have sex after seeing them fighting.
"Love and hate have the same origin", this is what Amanesis told me! She always uses the name of the night to talk about some twisted theories, as if the goddess of the night is really her life mentor.
One afternoon, Athena hid behind the temple and secretly arranged for Amon to kiss Medici who was napping under a tree. Amon saw through her in advance, so he grafted the plot she designed onto herself. Amon saw Athena gave him a sly smile. You saw through me, and I saw through you too! I'm on the fifth floor this time, hehe. Amon thought she would cancel the development of the plot, but he only saw her walking under the tree with light steps like dancing, like a puppet, and kissing Medici on tiptoe. The red angel woke up, but forgot to push her away at the first time. So they hugged and kissed each other, like a real pair of lovers.
Amon suddenly felt a tiny crack in his heart. He instinctively rejected the emotion that was too human. He knew that mythical creatures were different from humans. In the chaotic period of the Second Epoch, the ancient gods did some extraordinary things to each other in order to eliminate the extra extraordinary characteristics. In the eyes of humans, it was only done by lovers, but it was just normal for them. Even now, gods and angels do not have the common moral values of humans on that matter. He understood. So he just forgot about it lightly.
On a quiet night, Athena came to Amon's room in the dark.
In the past, Athena always sneaked into his residence to see what bedtime stories his father told him every night, and to compare who was the favorite child of the ancient sun god. She was always discovered by her father, who then gently "asked" her to leave, and she screamed in anger.
Athena sneaked up to Amon who was pretending to sleep, took away the monocle he had placed aside, and also imagined a monocle that was exactly the same - but it was just for show and had no function and put it back in its place.
One morning later, he received the monocle that Athena had secretly returned to him. He carefully stroked the lens and felt a line of words winding along the edge. It was in ancient Feysac language, and it looked like something from a holy book, but he had never read anything like it.
"The Lord says, You are neither cold nor hot, therefore I will spit you out of my mouth." That was the line of tiny words she carved on the edge of her monocle frame with the pen of Al-Suhod. It still burns his icy snake-like skin, bringing endless tiny pains, like embers on cracked scorched earth, which will rise again as long as there is wind.
Time flies. It has been a long time since the fall of Star Angel. But he still occasionally goes to the God-forsaken Land alone and sits on the top of the huge black tombstone, as if he is sitting on the towering Tower of Babel. The dome is only one step away, but it is forever unreachable. She died and woke up again. She always appears in front of you, but you can never catch her trace, because she is always a cold flame, dust in the wind, a crack in a lie, a shadow of an oath, and a contradiction in contradictions.
It's interesting to see how even the best thieves can have their stuff stolen if they are willing and say nothing.
During the banquet, in a hidden lounge backstage, several dukes sat there bored and played Wheatstone Bridge. Abraham and Antigonus were bored by the endless socializing. Only Medici and Tudor seemed to be able to handle it with ease. In such a space, no one knew how Athena sneaked in - but she often appeared suddenly in various places, and even Solomon was startled by her sudden appearance from the treetops in the garden. If it weren't for Adam and Amon's face, her extraordinary characteristics would have been fed to His dog long ago.
Because there were not enough chairs, she sat on Medici without waiting for anyone to give her a seat. The latter had an impatient expression on his face, but his body movements had already betrayed him - he even adjusted his posture to make the girl lean more comfortably and not be hurt by the decorations on his suit. The people around him seemed to be used to it, but their micro-expressions and movements still betrayed them. Despite his clown ability, Antigonus couldn't help but tremble his ears, and he gently kicked Bethel with his foot to express his surprise.
Because she was reading with her head down, her off-shoulder dress slipped down slightly, revealing a piece of pale skin like moonlight. Medici grabbed her long hair by the back of her neck and tried to make her sit up straight. "Hey! I'm no longer the child you rubbed me with!" Athena complained dissatisfiedly and threw the book in her hand at him. As a result, Amon grafted the flying book to Tudor's direction. Tudor avoided it of course, but raised his head and looked at her with his beautiful blue eyes like gems. She suddenly felt guilty and remembered what happened that afternoon. It seemed that the warmth of the other person was still on her skin. She jumped up from Medici like a frightened bird and tried to slip away quietly.
The climate in Solomon's royal city was dry and it rarely rained. Athena had Medici bring down a gloomy thunderstorm on the last night of late summer, as if she had read some boring romance novel about lovers having a tryst in the rain. At that time, Alistair Tudor was sitting in his study reviewing documents, and the soft light from the ceiling lamp made his cold profile look like a perfect ivory sculpture. At this time, the pointed French window in the southwest corner of the room was opened, and the wind and rain with the coolness of the late night swept in all at once. Ding ding ding! I'll give you some surprises! Athena's golden hair was soaked, and it bent against her thin and transparent skin, and she smiled at him. Her white dress fluttered in the wind, and she jumped lightly onto the floor of the room, like a transparent cocoon that was about to break. Her gray eyes were underground rivers and gloomy cloudy days, but Alistair seemed to see an eternal and huge vortex of stars in her eyes at that moment, a dazzling light that could make all shining beings pale in comparison. She gave him a hug that smelled like rain and rotten grass, and Alistair could feel her slender bones through her thin clothes.
Tudor didn't seem to know that Athena was the Star Angel herself. After all, except for a few people who knew about it back then, everyone knew that the Star Angel no longer existed. Her tombstone still stood there alone, an indelible proof. Tudor treated her as a poor substitute, but everyone could see that he was still hopelessly in love with her. Amon thought, how stupid, it would be best if he could steal his naive and gloomy fantasy. But he still didn't move, as if he was more confident than the War Angel in some way. After all, if you are strong enough, you may be able to control a city, you may be able to control a country, but you can never control a mystery of nothingness, a smile that only appears in the polar night.
Shi Tianshi knew that he had lost control, but he still did not move. As long as he did not move, he would not end up losing everything, even if the current chance of winning was only 30%. He could wait for an opportunity to change his fate, and he could steal everything that did not belong to him, as long as he wanted.
The angel still had a smile on his face and looked happy. He knew that he would win in the end. Now he just had to step back and watch how this perfect drama played out according to His wishes.