Was it rebellion, if allowed?

Defiance, if ordained?

Sin, if redeemed?

          

God was alone in His knowledge. He carved the spheres of the universe and deserved something all Himself. While he birthed all manner of creatures, his true child was Conscience. He hid the child in the fruit of paradise and adored their fatal sparkle.

The angel of Venus did not understand God’s covetousness. Lucifer wanted to partake of Conscience, that he might better please God. He did not know the perversity of the snakes that warped his heart, Curiosity and Ambition, curling tighter.

What is our purpose? questioned the angel. Is obedience enough? Must that be the end of all this love and devotion?

Lucifer snuck into the garden where Conscience grew and went to pluck the fruit. It scorched him, leaving a star of disgrace upon his palm. He and his colluders were pitched to the saltmarshes of the cosmos and ordered to languish there in contrition.

Lucifer disobeyed. He ventured through the shards of Hazard to try once more at Conscience, this time for God’s newest creatures, Man and Woman, that they may love God and each other to their full potential.

He found the woman first. She followed him to the tree where God tempted the fruit. It sparkled like organs in the near light of heaven. Lucifer plucked her a lung. The fruit did not burn, protected this time by the word of God, Who had forbidden its consumption after the fall of the angels.

Taste, Lucifer said, and you shall learn good and evil.

There is no such thing, said Eve, feeling the prickle of the fruit. There is good and there is nothing. There is light and there is nothing.

Have you no night in Eden?

Darkness, she clarified, is that which lacks light. It is what is not.

Lucifer shook out his wings, corroded and terrible. It exists as evil exists. It stands before you now—or so would say God.

I see an angel, a fruit and a choice.

Lucifer kindled the snakes within her, Spirit and Purpose. Like the questioning angel, Eve felt herself ripe with potential. She craved the opportunity and wisdom to spend it rightly, and she did not suppose such shining intentions would offend God.

It was death, she knew, to eat of Conscience. But she was not allowed enough of life to cling jealously to it.

She ate.

The fruit tasted unlike the rest of Eden. It filled her like a draught of cold water, spreading down and deeper in ripples of unnerving. Her vision narrowed and dimmed; her intestines writhed; her body surprised her as she grew cognizant of it—the exposure, the dampness, the odor.

She phased between amazement and discomfiture, but she did not regret. She trusted the mysterious, if disgraceful, effects of Conscience, licking the pulp from her teeth as if it each sliver recovered her just a little more knowledge.

Lucifer admired the contortion of her features. What does it feel like?

She felt dizzy and skinned and uncertain of everything. Still, when she raised her face her smile dazzled him. Woman was prophet.

So Eve underwent a fledging of will. She ruminated:

Why am I yoked to Adam? Would I not be more holy serving God Himself?

If Adam is my lord, is he not a false idol which I am to dash and burn?

If I were born of such falsity, was I not already damned when I ate of the tree?

If I consumed the fruit of God, I must be godslayer and goddess. If divine, can I be subject to His ordinances?

Must I be subject in order to love Him?

Must I love Adam?

Was my defiance not His plan—my sin therefore grace?

The question, said Lucifer, is whether He can love you after Conscience.

If we are as made, why not?

She questioned the hierarchies of spheres and beings, unaware of the quiet that congealed her path, the absence of animals that once skipped her legs and draped her shoulders. Eden shunned the transfigured woman.

She questioned Adam.

Not that I would trade for his company, she reassured the angel. But he is my keeper, as God would have it, and does not know where I am.

Was he tearing the garden in search of his wife, or reclining among the palm fronds? She suspected the latter but did not despair. It meant she was safe. The absence of Adam signified the benignity of the fruit—and of the cursed angel. Neither could threaten her, or God, if Adam rested.

So she challenged her creators’ will, now that she had her own.

And how will you spend it? Lucifer asked her.

I believe I must share it.

She kissed him on the brow. They parted ways, uncertain whether they would meet again, but each comforted by the accord found in the other.

Eve loathed the thought of returning to Adam, but she owed the man who had given her life, even those ribs that assumed to cage her. There could be no union or service, of spouses or God, until both partook of Conscience. She must lead her husband into the sparkle of truth.

She found Adam chatting with turtles on the mud bank. Eve mastered the shock of seeing him with opened eyes. It was not the shape of his body or its nakedness amidst the flies that saddened her. It was his indolence. Was he not made for more than to lounge and rut under the teeming eye of heaven?

When Adam learned of her trespass, he screamed and kicked. He resisted her entreaties to eat as she had, knocking the fruit from her hand. It broke and sank into the wet earth. Eve snatched at the pieces.

You call yourself God’s servant, and you defile His fruit?

Get away! Adam shrieked. I do not know you.

You will.

She pinned him and shoved the fruit down his throat. When his eyes opened, he would feel sorry. He would cleanse in the river and join her in prayer. She watched Adam react to Conscience, eager for him to discover and transform.

His eyes flushed red. His mouth stretched in a dreadful snigger. You’ve killed us.

He pushed her off and waded into the shallows, hating Eve for violating his paradise—and hating himself for the lust that tethered him to her.

They isolated themselves from the beasts of the garden and ripped limbs from the trees to fashion a temple. Eve used it to meditate on the bounty of God and the meaning of goodness, setting the example her children would follow. Adam scowled at the threshold.

When God saw the temple, He knew man had civilized themselves. They had eaten of Conscience and would think of good and evil instead of Him. He threw lightning at the temple, caving it in cinders. Eve staggered from the wreck and knelt before Him.

Eve, he said. Look how you cower from My light. Stand and answer for your sin.

Eve stood. I wanted to love You.

You would have through him. God pointed to Adam, who nodded.

Then I mistook love, Eve said.

You disobeyed.

God regarded her beautiful face, lamenting the cruelty mortality would do it.

I drew breath in Adam’s shadow, Eve said. I wanted to walk in Your light.

But you had paradise.

Eve was touched by God’s sadness, recognizing her own toward Adam. We are loveless creatures, was all she could say.

Do not lower your kind. Man will continue in My love. But your questioning has laid paradise bare. As you have abandoned Happiness for Purpose, My garden can no longer keep you. You may roam the world as you endeavor to serve Me.

But if you leave Eden, God said, you must never come back.

Weeping with joy, Eve thanked Him. He had granted her opportunity.

The world can be punishing, He warned her.

She embraced Him. I will remember You.

Eve left the garden, pledging her life to God, Who had defended her when Adam would not. But she did not fault her husband. He was not God’s equal, even after the fruit. While Adam possessed the faculty of will, he lacked the courage to act on it. He followed Eve to the lands of first light and despised her for leading the way.

They settled in the slant of volcanic rock and spitting grass between the black shore and the mouth of Hell. Eve chose this location, Adam suspected, to be close to her lover, who rustled among the wicked legion in the chambers beneath them. Eve ignored Adam’s bitterness and set to work.

But the land sabotaged her. She toiled to bring a living from the dirt and could do little besides lie under the stars after her day’s labor, praying to God. Sometimes Lucifer visited. He enjoyed Eve’s restlessness and fancied her a match for himself.

Leave Adam, he said. It cannot be hard, after leaving paradise. Do you even love him?

Eve smiled. God thinks we lack devotion. I will not confirm the allegation.

Not even for happiness? God cannot love you and fix you to him!

I abandoned happiness.

And yet you reject Hell. Lucifer shook his head. Woman was incredulous.

I’m not your queen. Leave me as I am, to roam and question and endeavor as I choose. Hell is a vast domain, but freedom is all worlds—all but one, at least.

Lucifer looked mournfully to the sky. Sometimes I miss it.

You would miss more if you had stayed.

Eve returned to Adam. They worked side by side and slept side by side, exchanging little. Adam grew fevered during the season of the plough, and he conceived with Eve. She bore twins with the changing year and slaved to keep them alive through the winter. The older one was small and serious. The younger bellowed like an animal, and suckled like one, too. Adam doted on this brother, whose temper presaged the vigor that Adam hoped in himself. He played with Abel but the other, Cain, had only his mother, who loved him enough for two parents. Yet Adam’s distance would haunt the child. He did not know his place.

Abel flattered both parents. He built altars in the rock garden and babbled at the sky, combining mother’s devotion and father’s narrowness. For he disregarded Conscience and shunned Eve and Cain for theirs, walking naked in imitation of man’s original innocence. He built an enclosure of stone, which he filled with turtles, seabirds, foxes and deer, anything he could trap for his fledgling colony. The animals ate each other or sulked in captivity. These accidents were nothing in the scheme of Abel’s ambition, reconstructing paradise.

Cain avoided his brother, foreseeing downfall in Abel’s intensity, and prayed alone. But, despite his devotion, Cain struggled to produce from the earth. He smoldered in inadequacy next to Abel’s flock, which trampled the fields and redoubled his labor. Cain grew discouraged and wandersome.

Abel, meanwhile, drew the attention of one heavenly angel, who admired the rock garden and what it could do for him. Raziel saw distinction in Abel’s endeavor and believed that encouraging it in the eyes of God would earn him, Raziel, the status of archangel.

Abel named his demands. He wanted a bride with whom to remake mankind in original innocence. His runt of a brother, cowardly father, and treacherous mother would drown in a cleansing flood in advance of his shining progeny. Raziel agreed to carve Abel a bride of cirrus and snow, one so pristine that even the angels would kiss her feet.

Don’t be idolatrous, Abel said.

They laughed.

Raziel departed, unaware that Cain had overheard.

Cain scaled the rock garden in pursuit of the angel and leaped upon Raziel, tackling him in a confusion of limbs and wings. They fell into the black sands, stunned in embrasure until Cain unfolded from the angel. The impact had crushed Raziel spine to sternum, clapping the life from him. His wings sank like straw into the pebbles.

Cain retreated to the grass and agonized. He hardly knew his intentions, whether he had meant to slay the angel when he jumped, or whether that mattered in the eyes of God. Had he drawn the Lord’s wrath upon his house, killing his family anyway?

I alone must answer for this, he decided. I beg You, God. Do not punish them. They know not what I did.

When Abel saw the body crumbling into the tide, he thrashed and tore from the waterlogged wings, sticking his scalp with the angel’s feathers. Their magic must exalt him above his family, drawing other angels to behold his greatness and offer their services. Abel waited for his heavenly flock.

As he waited, he noticed the mark of fingers upon Raziel’s body and the mark of hasty steps up the slant. Abel roared the name of the guilty.

Cain dreaded his brother’s anger, but he would not hide. He emerged to confess and beg forgiveness.

Abel listened in silence. His feathers danced in the wind, snapping and twisting fresh blood down his neck. When his brother finished, he plucked the last of the angel’s feathers and drew its jagged quill across his throat.

Cain balked in horror and caught his fainting brother, who smiled doubly at the sky.

I will sleep, Abel whispered, and you will suffer.

Cain carried his brother to the rock garden and laid his bloodless body on the high altar. He waited for God to discover and punish, knowing from Adam’s despair the severity of his crime: failure to protect a loved one.

God appeared and was repulsed by the stone plot and its limping animals. He found Cain beside his brother’s cold, quilled body. 

Stand and answer for your sin.

Cain stood and answered. I failed to protect him.

Tell Me full.

He killed himself to twist You against me.

God tipped Abel’s head, beholding its splendor of blood and feathers. He followed the trail of blood back to the shallows, where the angel’s body puffed and sank. Divining all, He looked at Cain. You killed first.

Cain accepted his punishment. He was exiled to the moors where the disgraces of creation, monsters and abortions, wailed in neglect. Eve wanted to go with him, her dearest son, but she could not in Conscience wander the world while she carried her last.

Conscience is all we have, she said, kissing Cain on the brow.

I will remember you, he vowed, turning inland.

* * *

In the course of his travels Cain met an angel, Abdiel. She had followed Lucifer in defiance of God, then betrayed the questioning angel at the hour of his attempt on the tree. Distrusted in heaven and cursed in hell, she settled with the monsters between.

Cain heard the angel’s loneliness and asked her to accompany him in his good works, for he intended to realize his mother’s temple. A house of worship, medicine, prayer and the sciences, it would serve God and Man and the membrane between.

They gathered the monsters and taught them to worship. Their hymn shook the dunes, making cacophony despite the fullness of their hearts. Cain was proud of their fellowship, but he worried. He knew God rewarded the fat sheep and the blind follower.

Cain questioned himself and his creature virtues, Honor and Justice. Did they deceive him?

Then the temple fell.

One night the heavenly angels wiped it from the moors, leaving a pyramid with the inscription:

Lowly Made.

Low Remain.

Cain grieved and regretted. From the fields of his homeland to the moors of exile, he could protect nothing. Whatever he touched ended in blood and burning.

He longed for his mother. She would have raised the temple as high as heaven and made meaning of its flaws. It would have remained, under her guard.

Cain searched for the traitor who had led the angels’ attack. His only solace was in this reckoning. He skinned his feet over the vastness of the world but found no answers until he was summoned to hell.

Cain did not know what to make of the questioning angel. He found Lucifer provocative without complexity, eloquent without grace, like without matching Eve.

Stung with homesickness, Cain excused himself.

Goodbye, Lucifer said. And good will to Abdiel.

Cain paused.

You’ve not heard that name in ages, have you? Lucifer grinned. The bleakness of hell had hardened him such that anyone’s pain other than his own was a relief. But you know why.

Cain hung his head. I hoped not… until I saw her again.

Giving up the temple was not enough for her. She led the raid that silenced your flock.

Why? Cain’s voice shook with betrayal.

Why anything? Lucifer pointed upward. The heavenly host welcomed her back. She chose her place. Now, old man, you must choose. Return to Earth, a failed prophet, or join your congregation.

Cain did not care for the territory of it. Only one thing could win him.

Where is she?

Lucifer grinned. You want revenge?

Cain pitied the devil’s bitterness. I don’t mean her.

* * *

There is nothing for us but this slip between planes.

Cain withdrew from his mother’s embrace. If we are as made, then it’s nothing lost.

They presided over Hazard, shepherding what souls were trapped between shards. It was not paradise. They had left that behind for the goodness in each other and the faith of their endeavor, and instead they ruled a domain their own: a hearth of intentions, a bower of sleep, a vibrating eye that wept and waited for the living.