Forsaken Eden, Glass Exile

I awoke in a rotten Garden of Eden, in the Reaper's arms, as Samael wiped black gore from his skull hollows. Fireflies buzzed like ghosts over the dead gray grass, and the Tree of Death wept blood, rotten heart-shaped fruits dangling from frozen branches. A dusting of snow and sterile muted skies jangled like keys on a prison guard's waste. Samael gathered me into his black cloak, sitting at the base of the Tree of Exile, the Tree of Abortion and Qliphoth Petit Mort, and he rocked me gently.

"Do you remember, my foundling?" he asked softly, eye hollows glowing blue.

I sobbed. "Samael, why in the world did you take me here?"

He spread his wings, and they illuminated like a photographic negative.

"To tell you the true story of your heart," he wept, tracing my breasts and stomach in a black Goth Lolita dress and Louboutins. Apparently, he had dressed me like a Goth heiress.

"I'm not sure I want to see it."

"I'm not sure I want to show it," the Grim Weeper cried, then he laid me down on his chest, wings apex to the nightshade sky, and like an antique cinema, I was drawn in to the black and white memory of a youth of Eve… a childhood I did not know, but ached like miasma, the mother's ruin:

"Do you remember how we fell?" His serpent tongue swallowed Michael's heart. Samael took God's chosen light, claiming that which was was stolen from him. He cast the glory downwards, to the gross plane of man. His fallen brothers flocked to it, followed his lightning path. Samael struck the primordial ocean, electrifying life into being. Organic compounds began their dance, and the rest, I was told, is history.

He wore the abyss as his cloak now, wandering the earth as a skeleton. His words were forbidden poison, and the Tree he planted bore nothing. The years wore on and on. I was still unborn, Athena in his skull.

The dark angel waited for me. His third eye haunted my dreams. Through it, I saw the world.

I was motherless like him. I must have blossomed like a spring flower to Samael, but to me, Eden was eternity. Just the wilderness and the Chime Lord. He would plait my hair with roses and sing me to sleep each sun-fall. I was another of his ghosts, so I thought. We wandered the between-spaces, the border of existence and time. The bone man and the girl. Like it would always be this way.

I had no idea he had been beautiful. I would stare at my reflection in pools, soft beside his harshness. My golden hair grew, and I thought myself beautiful. Everything had such potency then: the fires we dreamt beside and starlight he hunted under. He would slap my hand from the flames when I only wanted to hold them. He told me to chase fireflies instead. I'd bring them back by the handful, and he'd whisper them asleep. I strung the ground with the lightning-bugs under his peaceful gaze. I put two in his eyes once while he slept.

"Why, magpie?" he'd asked me.

"To give you something to see by."

He laughed, letting them fly around his skull. "I've seen too much in my time." One by one, he plucked them out.

Eden wasn't a place, just my childhood. I thought I would become like him as I grew. That the flesh would fall from my bones and I would run bare through the woods. Each time I bled, I thought it was a bit of me leaving. That once I leaked enough blood, my skin would peel like a hollowed banana. Then Samael would tear me from my caul and I would finally become real. But I grew like an apple, ripening. My bird bones gave way to woman, a thing I had no name for. I became terrified of my own reflection as I moved further and further from him.

So I strayed farther from him. He began to look at me differently, and the night fires swelled with his song. Somehow, he became more alive. The wise words he once spoke were stolen by some youthful voice. He laughed louder and taught me to hunt. He began to chase me through the hills, hunting the girl that strayed from him. Each evening, I'd venture farther, searching for more beautiful fruits and meats his teeth would cut like butter. But somehow, always, Samael found me.

My independence came with a price. He expected more of me. By day, he'd teach me all things: the flight of birds or courses of stars. I could track the most elusive of prey and made the nightly fires now. He had me learn his songs. Sometimes, he fell asleep to my voice. I hated being alone in the darkness, so I would curl against Samael, wishing he'd sung me to sleep.

One day, blood flowed from my legs. The bleeding wouldn't stop, and I thought I was shedding my skin. The moon pulled at me like I was an animal. I ran through the forest with wild hope, waiting for the branches to pull the flesh from my bones. I thought that finally I would be born. I ran and ran, to no avail. My feet blistered and began to bleed. I ran until my bones kissed the dirt, thinking the pain that of a mother in labor. Finally, I could run no more, and I slept under the curtain of a willow. I wrapped the pain around me like a blanket, waiting to be liberated in the morning.

I woke to his roars. It was the ugliest sound I'd known. He knelt by my feet, pouring water over them as he tore at his head. "What have you done?" he cried, looking at my wounds. I screamed at the pain, miserable. Of course he wasn't proud My flesh didn't peel like serpent's skin. It was stuck. I was malformed, unwhole. I'd failed him. "Speak to me, girl!" he demanded.

I pointed at the blood between my legs. "I will never be born," I lamented. I gripped the bones of his hands. "I'm buried, trapped, Samael. Each day I grow more dead."

If my guardian had a face, he would have been horrified. "No," he said, voice raw. The sky darkened as the air became ice. "No child. You're alive. I am the one who is death." He set into a frenzy healing me. I couldn't walk for months.

"What is this blood on my legs then?"

"A blessing," he said quietly. "They'll say it's a curse, one day."

I rounded like the moon. The wound healed, but the pain remained. The fact he was other was too much to believe. So I raged against it. Sometimes I would run away and starve myself to look like him. He would wrestle me to the ground and try to force food down my throat, but I would bash my head on rocks, almost breaking open my skull. I hated the monthly blood. I wanted to empty myself from the insides, to cut out everything and be hollow like him. I would scrape myself open and wait. The blood flowed, but always coagulated. It must have been torture for Samael.

I came back to our camp with a new wound. A slit across my forehead like his. My obsidian knife shone in the moonlight.

"Stop cutting yourself open," he told me.

"I want to be like you."

"You want anything but that. Anything." His third eye was sealed shut. I'd never seen the hollow open. Only in my dreams.

I cursed him, then fled to the hills. I stayed there for moons by the river. For the first time, he did not follow. Finally sick of my loneliness, I returned to the place he loved. A wretched, barren hill, with a gnarled blackened tree that clawed at the sky like a dragon. It bore no leaves or fruit. Perpetual fog clung to it and it was always gray with winter. How he loved it. Bare like him. I always hated that place.

Of course I found him sleeping beneath it. I walked the treacherous path to the tree. The steep cliff beneath me was slick with scree. Furious, I began to cut it, sawing at the wood. He woke with a scream. Black blood flowed from his ribs. I dropped the knife, bursting into tears. I felt like a worm crushed by the rain.

"Don't cry," he hushed me, comforting me through his pain.

"You're bleeding? But how?" I sobbed. Samael never bled.

"There is but one flower that grows in Hell," he hushed me, singing me to sleep as he once did. I hadn't understood at the time. His third eye opened while I slept, a blood-red jewel on his head. It pillaged my unformed brains, tilling the soil within. I had finally rebelled against him, and the season's cycle was nearing completion. The seed he carried needed a bearer. The soil was rich with potential. Later, I hoped he loved me for who I was, not what I would become for him. I always will, I suppose.

I was pure then, tabula rasa, a blank slate waiting for form. I knew I wasn't whole, and each day I moved further from Eden. What I searched for wasn't sleeping in the trees. It was hidden behind me, in his watchful gaze. I was a ghost before I'd met him. Haunting the hills as I lived on air. I would have been another discarded creation, save the potential he saw in me. I knew what I owed Samael. Like a rough diamond, Samael honed me into adamantine. The broken maker had seen past my flaws.

I came to think that was his power. To see the beauty in the most wretched of things. Nothing, god or angel, could see souls like Samael. But he was blind to his own reflection. He barely understood himself. I think it terrified him. He wore a skull to be spared of his eyes, then sought his reflection in drops of rain. After the night I hurt him, we entered a strange kind of peace. I stopped starving and maiming myself. He joined me in my firefly capture and would hunt them with quiet desperation. They were my playthings, like always.

If only I had known they were souls.

I grew taller and scaled trees to get the elusive jeweled bugs that crowned the canopy. Those were the souls of seraphim, like angels on Christmas Trees. He wove them into nets of pearls for my hair. I would dance for him as night fell, mimicking the flight of the butterfly. He would sing like the wind, sending me flying across the grass. I began to embrace my flesh, loved how it wrapped me in sensations. The touch of light and kiss of rain. I wondered if Samael could feel. I began to fear he felt nothing, and was just a dead tree that refused to fall.

When I was older, I understood our home was the place of death and dreams. Where he reigned, the twilight hours. I had been born into a graveyard. The ghosts I used to see began to fade. One morning, I woke unable to see the fireflies. My breasts were ripe and hips shapely like the wolves. The animals began to turn from me.

Even Samael changed. He began to move slower. His bones creaked. He spent more time sitting under his tree. He watched me, skull smiling as always. Sometimes, night and day would roll in, and he wouldn't move an inch. Dead leaves fell on his cloak, and I had to brush moss from his brow. I would kiss his cheek and sing to him. I pretended he was asleep.

Worms began to crawl through his skull. I plucked them from his eyes, begging him to wake up. "Please, Samael. Come run with me. I miss you, you know." I handed him an apple. It fell to the ground as his hands went limp. His teeth clattered as if he was trying to speak, but no voice came from within. He walked like a feeble man, leaning on my shoulder. We made it halfway down the hill until he collapsed. I carried his bones to the riverside and washed them in the water. Pests had eaten holes in them. I picked the bugs from his marrow.

The seasons turned. I became his guardian. I protected his bones from rot, washed him until my hands bled. It was months between his wakings. I hoped each time he would speak. His bones turned black, began to decay. The horror that I could truly be alone sat in my stomach like a stone. Whatever magic that had animated him finally left. I truly understood what death was. It wasn't an absence, but worse. It was him being ever there, but impossible to touch. It was a cruel lesson that he taught me.

One night, I took my knife. I skewered the obsidian into the tree. Hoping beyond hope he would wake. Pain had power, but it wasn't enough. The dead wood moaned; Samael's skull fractured. I cradled the broken pieces and cried.

Soon, the tree's branches fell. His bones had crumbled to dust. I kissed his remains, tasted death, and was driven out of Eden. In exile I walked, alone.

I wandered through the wastelands, Samael's cloak wrapped around me. It was a moth-eaten, molding thing, but the closest I had to a companion. Even the beasts of the fields would not come to me now. They sensed I was different. Human. It was why I'd grown deaf to their calls. I strayed to the sea, kept camp in a cave. I would sit for days like his skeleton, wishing that I could fade. I learned what Hell was then. It was being truly alone. I stopped eating, and delirium painted the shadows with him. I imagined Samael stood beside me, bowed as he asked for a dance. He took my hand and led me from the cave. We stood at the lip of the ocean. It felt like my heart, endless and lonely.

"Why did you leave me?" I asked him.

"I never left you, child. Now eat for me, please." He held me against his breast, stroked my hair, then danced into the evening fog. I swam into the sea after him, screaming after Samael. But he'd vanished. I cursed him, killed a fish and ate it raw. I grew strong to spite him. He was hideous, I decided. Unnatural and cruel. Even in death, he tormented me.

I left the beach and journeyed to the west, to the land where the sun died each night. It was lush and beautiful there, green beyond imagining. I tasted new fruits, learned how to survive in the different terrains. Samael's lessons served me well.

And then I met the man.

I knew that he was like me. Raised in the wild lands, alone in the world until then. We started a new life together, and what I thought was the golden age of my life faded to a pleasant dream. I all but forgot Samael and tucked him under the shadows of my dreams. My husband was of flesh and blood, and I took my place beside him. Some would come to call him Adamah, and say he gave me his rib. But my husband was not the first Adam, and it was not from his bones I was made. The first one abandoned me to the wasteland. It was necessary, I suppose, but how was I to know.

It was good, but the goodness didn't last. I loved Adam as I had learned to love Samael. I would sing and dance for him. We hunted and laughed together. Our conversations never ended, and we would spend blissful hours in each others' arms, exploring the second parts of our souls. He was so gentle and kind, like water in my hands. We felt like we were one, a being of clay, cleft in two, that fit perfectly back together.

But something in the heavens wanted us gone. Lightning would strike inches from our feet. The beasts grew a taste for man. Soft leaves I once rubbed my cheek against caused rashes to bloom on my skin. Nettles stung, thorns stuck, and sick meat poisoned us. One night wolves surrounded our camp, licking their hungry chops. I grabbed Adam's hand to run. Now I knew why Samael had chased me, so many moons ago. He was preparing me to be prey.

We moved north, to Samael's home. The hills of my childhood had changed. Everything was barren, frozen in perpetual winter. All the trees stood dead, and colorless shrubs dotted the dying grasses. Granite boulders had been exposed by the eroded soil. They stood sentinel over the valley that skirted Samael's tree. Walking past them was like being watched by inhuman gods. We eked out a living. It just grew colder and colder. I had no idea how to make clothes, possessed none of the arts of the angels. How could I? I didn't know they even existed. They had been watching us all this time, invisible. They'd driven Samael from his home and condemned his lands to Purgatory. The ice of the unliving beings left ghost trails of frost in the morning. His Tree, sleeping knowledge, had been changed to death. I would climb the hill when Adam was asleep and sit in its rotting boughs, sleeping under the freezing stars as I tried to remember the past. I prayed then, something I had no word for. I hoped the moon pitied me. All the things I never asked Samael bit at my heels like serpents. Had things really been so blissful that I never questioned my existence? I would have given anything for an hour with him.

The hope of some salvation faded. I knew, in my heart, we were dying. Adam didn't know what death was. I did. I wanted to protect him from it at all costs. Or maybe I just wanted to protect myself. He was like my youthful innocence, strong but so pure. He'd never washed someone's bones, nor imagined beetles could eat his flesh. We huddled in our cave, trying to share warmth. Each night, I walked the treacherous path to the tree. The ridges had crumbled away, and the spine of the trail nearly killed me. I left apples as desperate offerings, knowing they were pointless as I brought them nonetheless. The gentler fruits had died in the frosts, and only the hardy ones remained. Finally, the fruit went away. The game disappeared, we could catch no fish, so we survived on roots and bark.

I laid down one night and knew I would die. It was just a truth that appeared to me. I contemplated it for a while. Maybe I wanted to join Samael in the dust. The angels' presences did strange things to our minds. They twisted our thoughts and subdued us. But their spell was broken by his memory. The hill called to me, and I came.

The moon was achingly beautiful. I walked the path in anger, sick of sorrow and pain. If I was a bastard child, so be it.

I didn't recognize him that night. The wind bit at my bones. I heard the chains jangle and dogs howl in the wastelands. I should have known it was him. Instead, I saw a stranger.

All was still. I walked slowly towards him. He stood at the base of the tree. I saw him and thought I had died.

The branches grew from his ribs. The stranger was beautiful and bone pale, dressed in severe black robes. He smiled, somber, almost mad. He was everything I tried to touch in the flames. I thought that he would burn me.

He beckoned me to come closer. I flew like a moth to his light, standing a mere foot from him. His eyes were the clear blue of desert pools. I wanted to run to his arms.

"Samael?" I asked, not believing it. I thought him a delusion of my mind.

"Do not be afraid," he whispered.

"I'm dying, Samael."

"I know." He hushed me as I sobbed into his breast. I cried out in wonder and sorrow. He was so beautiful, but I had only this moment with him. I had lived my life with his shadow, always carried his bones. He kissed me, soothed me as he never could before. I didn't care if he was my imagining. His voice coiled with life; the arms that held me were like my own. Not the whisper of graves or touch of dry bone. Even Adam could not complete me like this. I wondered if he had been Samael's creation, to keep me from being alone.

I burrowed my head against his chest, waiting to die. His heart beat in tandem with my failing one. I understood my nakedness before him, the low creature that I was. Midnight came to Eden. He pressed his hand into the small of my back, like he wanted to slip under my skin. I ended where he began, circle dancing in his heart. He wiped the tears from my eyes and whispered into my hair.

"You are my flower, Eve." He drew the hem of his robe back, exposing his chest. I kissed the white flesh, finally able to touch his life. My tears caught like dew on his skin. I couldn't speak, silenced by his magnificence. He was like the moon I prayed to.

He sliced a crescent across his chest. Samael peeled back his flesh, broke away the ribs. They were bone branches, parts of the Tree. Death's heart pulsed before me. I was horrified. It beat like infinity. He revealed the essence of his divinity, all the knowledge I sought. It lived before me, under his skin. I was so removed from the moment, contemplating the angel's beauty, that I didn't realize the gravity of his act.

Humans walked bare through earth. Angels cloaked themselves. Seraphim hid behind wings. Samael had masked himself in my childhood. But now, Death bared his soul. The greatest taboo of all. He revealed himself to a mortal and broke the barrier between us. If only I had known what that would mean.

"I have only one heart to give."

He reached into himself, gaze calm and cold like an arctic sea. Amusement, pain, and intensity flickered across his eyes. Once more, his face was cryptic. I will never know what he thought. He took his heart. Gave it to me. He was the only warmth in the bleakness of Eden. A place of absolute zero, soon to be devoid of life

"Partake of my flesh. Eat."

"I can't," I protested, revolted.

"Take it, Havah. It's yours."

There was no fruit on the dead tree. I held the only bloom of winter.

I cradled it in my hands. Pressed it to my lips. His fire entered me. I screamed out, insides burning. But it was such a beautiful pain. He cradled me in his arms as I was truly brought to life.

My maker was left with a black hole for a heart. A pit that devours and consumes. Lust for the life that was once his. Death and I were born.

"I will always love you, girl."

Everything changed that day. I passed it on to Adam. Death entered our veins. My protector in Eden banished me from our home. He kept my heart with him. Such was the price of freedom

The original sin was love. Its coals are coals of fire. Stronger than death and the grave. The very flames of my lord.

Winter came to Eden. Oh, how it left us bare.

For now, I wait til spring.