“I’ve been here through two plagues, fall of Rome, schism in the Church, fall of Constantinople, and I’ve never seen such a cataclysm strike Heaven”, Peter gestured in disbelief. “They are usually so collected, peaceful and confident, even when faced with dire adversity. I’ve seen them overworked and tired to the point of dropping from their feet, and they still smiled and comforted people. But when Grace died, it felt as if their inner light died with her. They looked the way you’d expect a child to look if it came home and found its parents murdered. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I hope I never do. Was she so important?”

“Yes, she was, but not necessarily in just one meaning of the word. She was probably the highest ranking angel at that point, and everybody who knows her says she’s an absolutely wonderful person. Closest family to Azrael and Hypatia; they basically lived together for centuries, as parents and daughter. But the reason why everything broke was because of why she died. It was God’s fault. She prayed to God, God set her on a path, and then, due to no fault of her own, her life was ruined and her heart broke. If God could do this to the best of us, what does it say about God’s justice, righteousness, law? Is God merely a more powerful version of Satan, something the Muslims pray to – something that just proclaims laws out of his whims, and can do whatever he wants anyway, because his will is the supreme law, and if he wants to break the best and purest angel’s heart, that’s fine because he’s God? People’s lights went out because that’s not the God they knew, loved and believed in. The most fundamental truth of everybody’s life, that God is the greatest good and the highest virtue, broke. It’s like, God forgive me, Lord Shiva deciding to rape Lady Lakshmi. If that happened, everybody would just die. It’s completely inconceivable and impossible, though; thank God. But people also thought that the holiest of angels, sinless and perfect, dying because she did everything exactly as she was supposed to – prayed to God, performed her duties with highest honour, walked His path, had faith, chose highest love – that it was equally impossible. That just doesn’t happen; and when it did, thank God it soon became obvious what God’s plan was, and she and her husband were saved, because nobody was recovering from that. It was as if Heaven lost colour and everything turned gray, like a corpse. Time can now be marked in eras before the death of Grace, and after her resurrection, when everybody started living again”, Paul explained.

“I met Grace when I came here; she brought coffee for Lord Buddha and myself as he judged me, because it took longer than usual, with him correcting my energetics and teaching me to meditate properly”, Caterina was lost in thought. “She was wonderful. She just naturally put me at ease, explained everything, and she was so kind, intelligent and wise. May God forgive me, but when I heard of her death, my reaction was that I refused to believe in a God who would allow this. It’s just such an inconceivably terrible thing”, she shivered.

“And it was the Will of God that to happen, I think, because He wanted to show us that we have good reason to have faith. Also, we saw that the world is in good hands, with what Azazel, Karuna and the primordials did together to save her. They didn’t just shrug; they went beyond what everybody thought possible to fix this disaster and turn it into something good. And she was honoured by God later; her heart is now the seat of God’s Will, because she’s God’s most trusted person, with what she did and how she reacted. I would say it is completely righteous”, Peter concluded. “God didn’t just play games with her life. It was a test of trust, and the fact that He gave her that test means He already held her in the most high regard, and when she passed, she was honoured in the highest possible way. I know I’m an ass, Paul. I’ve been envious, jealous, stubborn and foolish, and I treated women poorly, but that woman is my ideal. I’ve never seen anyone display more faith in God, and more virtue and loyalty. I haven’t even met her properly, and I can tell you, I love her more than I love my own life”, he smiled.

“Keep that feeling present in your mind. Breathe it in”, Paul told him with the most focused tone. “Surrender to it without restraint”.

Peter’s form was bliss, and the structure of his soul changed, as the final impurities left him and he crystallised into blue vajra.

“Now I know how Christ felt about Magdalena, finally”, he smiled. “I was truly a beast of a hard neck and ill disposition, but I am finally tamed, by the Grace of God, for now I know what it means to worship God as a woman”.

“Same as Christ, only female?”, Catherine scratched her face in confusion.

“Truly; same as Christ, only female”, Peter confirmed. “I don’t know why I refused to accept it. There’s something foolish in my upbringing that assumes that a woman must always be a step down from a man. It is only now that I allowed myself to accept that she can be on the same step. And it’s so obvious – on every step where there’s God, they are a man and a woman together. God refuses to be male on a step where she also isn’t female, and God refuses to be female if there’s no godly man beside her to worship. ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them’. It is so obvious in hindsight: when God manifests, when he chooses what is his image, it is both male and female, and he outright refuses it to be just one, because it isn’t a complete image of God. That’s what I was missing – the understanding that God needs to be a woman beside a man, in order to be fully God. I would have thought it a blasphemy, and I thus stagnated for almost two thousand years, the stubborn ox that I am”, he waved his head in disbelief. “I am going to talk to Magdalena now, and kiss her holy feet if she allows me, for there’s an ancient wound that needs to heal”.

“What do you mean, I killed a hundred men? I only ever killed Niggers and Indians”.

…

“I had to get rid of those two naughty children he had left over when his first wife died. They were eating up all our food. It’s not like we killed them, we just sent them into the woods. They are probably fine”.

…

“I didn’t kill anyone, I just said she stole the money that my boyfriend took, it’s not like I could have let him get caught. It’s not my fault they hanged her, she should have defended herself better. And good riddance, I never liked her anyway, she thought she was prettier than me”.

…

“Why did Mommy kill me?”, a little girl cried inconsolably.

…

“Why do you look at me that way? I tortured the infidels to tell me where El Dorado is, so that we can use the gold for the greater glory of God. It’s not like I did anything evil”.

…

“And you say you were doing this since the fall of Rome?”, Carol was exasperated.

“Yup”, she smiled and hugged him from behind. “Just another day in the office”.

“You are a saint, an angel and a Goddess”, he laughed.

“Guilty as charged”, she kissed his ear. “It’s not always this bad. We usually got normal people who had hard lives and died trying really hard to do everything right, and only occasionally it gets this bad. I think people got seriously insane after the 14^th century plague. It caused xenophobia and paranoia, the Church got hit very hard by all the priests and monks dying, and their replacements were mostly there for the free food, and not God. From what I can tell, there’s much less chivalry and Christian virtues, and more cruelty, indifference and willingness to treat other humans like dirt. They call the previous centuries ‘the dark ages’, but to me this is the darkest I’ve seen. Materialism, godlessness and cruelty. Yuk”, she gestured in disgust. “Let’s ask the Boss if we were particularly unlucky or is this the new normal”.

…

“You should have seen the ones you missed”, Azrael waved his head in dismay. “Giordano Bruno was so horrible, they tore out his blasphemous tongue before they burned him on a stake, and when he came here, I could understand them completely. It is as if blasphemy was his favourite pastime, and he got very creative with it. Incredible arrogance and self-righteousness; he was probably sucking from the same teat as that Casimir fellow you had. And Galileo was the same – arrogant, self-righteous, everybody contradicting him is an ignorant fool, and he’s right because he’s Galileo, and he doesn’t have to prove anything to dunces. I also had a so-called nobleman who outright refused to be judged by a mere commoner, and asked for a jury of his peers”, he smiled.

“That attractor is doing serious influence, and corrupting anyone who has any affinity whatsoever for this line of thinking, and I’m afraid self-righteous arrogance is so much in human nature it’s very easy to get people prodded in that direction”, Carol nodded. “Combined with the plague madness that made it very easy to treat other people like non-human things, it is causing incredible nastiness”.

“We can only do our job here”, Grace took his hand. “And it’s to filter the nasty ones out of the system permanently. Sure, Satan made it easy, but they made their choice. We’ve seen counter-examples, people who were influenced by the attractor but it disgusted them and made them choose holiness at great expense to themselves”.

“She’s right”, Azrael nodded. “But we need to report these new developments. Maybe our elders can do something”.

…

“Unfortunately, we can’t do anything about it”, Lady Lakshmi shrugged. “We predicted this, and we are now at the point where Sanat Kumar’s attractors overtook our influence in power. He managed to seduce, deceive and destroy multiple angels, and the attractive power of his deception is now probably at its peak. Strategically speaking, he has the initiative now, and we can only treat the consequences and wait for it all to unfold. From what you told me, it’s not going to be pretty”.

“It’s not pretty now; how bad can it get?”, Carol wondered.

“It’s going to get so incredibly bad, you are going to remember this as the good old days”, she warned. “Godlessness is still an anomaly. It’s going to become the norm. Amorality is still an anomaly. It is going to become the norm. Vlad Dracula and Elizabeth Báthory are currently isolated examples and are seen as the worst people who ever lived. Give it a few centuries and people like them are going to make up a significant percentage of the population”.

“Who’s Elizabeth Báthory?”

“Oh, a woman who discovered that blood of young virgin girls makes her skin look younger, and she made it into her habit to lure them, slaughter them and bleed them so she could bathe in their blood. She killed three hundred or so innocent girls. Poor Hypatia had to deal with her and came to me in tears”.

“May God help us, holy Mother”, Carol was disgusted and shocked in equal measure.

“Indeed”, she nodded.

“However, on the good side of things, just before this tide of darkness we had Juan and Theresa. Both are wonderful and a great comfort in these times”.

It was the best work environment he could have hoped for, since Lord Azrael assigned his wife to be his tutor. As he heard, this was very much the usual practice – the spouses usually wanted to work together so that they would spend more time with each other, as that was a life priority, and since one was usually more experienced than the other, they would tutor them until they got the hang of it, which was usually very quickly, as everybody on the required level of competence was exceptionally smart. Carol wasn’t sure if that applied to him, but Azrael and Lakshmi told him not to worry.

He wasn’t sure why he kept his Wallachian name. That incarnation was very much an exception in his rather stellar career of an architect, engineer and a scientist. Even his less known incarnations were quite remarkable – his works on astronomy in Egypt and Babylon contributed significantly to the later achievements. As he found out only now, almost all of it was factually wrong, as it assumed that the relative observations from his standpoint on Earth were indicative of the actual reality of things. One more reason not to believe what you see, he reminded himself. What you see is usually the most deceptive part of what you think you know. That’s why I kept that name, instead of Vitruvius, or Nabû-nāṣir, chief architect under Nabû-kudurri-uṣur. It was the most fatal one, where all my flaws came to bear fruit. I kept it as a warning, to never again believe the supposed facts more than I believe the feeling in my heart. Had I listened to my heart, and not the facts and evidence, I wouldn’t have doomed myself and killed the most wonderful woman in the whole world.

To his great fortune, God was much smarter than he himself was stupid, and that really says a lot.

It was an equation with two solutions – when God gave Grace her husband, it could have ended either well or poorly, depending on what he did. If it ended poorly, and God didn’t provide for a solution that would compensate for it, he would literally have been at fault for her death – it would have been a trap akin to those Satan cooks up for his victims, only worse, because this one would be meant for an innocent person who did nothing but put her confidence in God. So, God had a very complex and roundabout way of solving that second wing of the equation in advance. And Grace, who trusted God with her life, is now someone God trusts with his Will, beside being his own Person. And she is his wife.

Father was right, he thought. I really do have more luck than brains.

“Ready?”, his wife whispered. “We have incoming”.

…

“My name is Casimir Liszinski. Where am I and who are you?”, the man wondered.

“My name is Grace, and this is my husband Carol. We are Judges appointed by God to evaluate your life”, she curtsied.

“Is there any place where I would be free from the accursed sheep of God and their judgments? First I am burned on a slow fire by them, and they follow me even in this damn place”, he fumed.

“You seem to be under multiple misapprehensions”, Grace smiled.

“Yes, that’s what they always say. I’m under a misapprehension for believing the Earth is round, that it revolves around the Sun, and that there’s no God. And you’ll teach me otherwise, or if I refuse, you’ll burn me on a stake while piously praying to your fucking bastard of a God that doesn’t even exist, evil morons and whoresons that you all are”.

Grace and Carol looked at each other in shock, and then Carol gave her a mischievous wink. “I think we should exchange our roles. Please, my Lady, stand aside and learn how it’s done”, and pushed her behind him as she giggled.

“So, my dear sir, you seem to be a man of reason, evidence and science, yes?”

“Indeed I am, but what would you know about those? You church rats keep persecuting scientists and science from the very beginnings. And you also subjugate women – just look at you, how you pushed your wife aside. You are all evil and I will resist you with all my power!”, he was working himself to a rage.

“By all means, please tell me more. For instance, how science was suppressed by the Church, and how I’m against it”, Carol said with the most serious face, while Grace worked to suppress her giggles.

“You and your fucking faith. Faith this, faith that. I’ll tell you what I have faith in: I have faith in evidence, measurements and my own mind. Before your faith, just look at what the people used to make. The Pyramids of Egypt, Colossus of Rhodes, the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis, the aqueducts of Rome. And after you rats and sheep came to power, we had nought but plague and superstition. You invented ways to torture and burn heretics, instead of doing something useful!”

“The Hanging Gardens of Semiramis and the aqueducts of Rome, you say?”, Carol said most seriously, as Grace looked like someone who wished for a pillow she could release her laughter into. “I think I heard something about those”, Carol scratched his head, as if trying to remember.

“If you hadn’t spent all your time memorising your stupid Bible, you might have actually read something of meaning”, the man sneered.

“Do you have any recommendations?”, Carol asked innocently. “Maybe ‘De architectura’ by Vitruvius? Or some other classics that I might be unaware of?”

“You flatter yourself, sheep”, Casimir snorted with contempt. “If you had the ability to understand such works, you wouldn’t be where you are now”.

“And where is that, if I may ask?”, Carol feigned interest.

“Persecuting free thought, science and freedom of religious thought!”, barked the demon, because that was the best description Carol could think of, for a black and godless astral being of hatred and malice.

“And I’m also oppressing my wife, you say?”, Carol smiled.

“One day women will be liberated and emancipated, and then bastards such as yourself better watch out”, Casimir growled. “It’s easy for you now to treat women as inferiors, since they are ignorant and uneducated, but once we teach them to read, write and have power in society, your entire Church will be overthrown, because you exist only in the atmosphere of ignorance and repression!”

“I will now bow out and give word back to my inferior, ignorant and oppressed wife, for I think I am done here”, Carol turned to Grace, who managed to assume her formal dignity.

“What would be your judgment?”, she asked.

“Hell for the godless souls”, he shrugged. “I mean, my initial impulse would have been to educate, but this one doesn’t have any desire to learn; he just growls his dogmatic nonsense. He looks as if he had been drinking from that satanic attractor I was used to power, and he is drunk with its madness, and thinks the reality of that world gives him power over God”.

“Yes, everything that is not of your disgusting made up ‘God’ must be satanic, you accursed uneducated sheep”, the man yelled. “Yes, throw me to hell because then you won’t have to face the power of my arguments!”

“No wonder they tore his tongue out down there. This is really unpleasant to listen to”, Carol mused.

“I agree”, she nodded, waved her hand and the man was gone. “Some things are supposed to be repressed and persecuted”.

“Thank you for letting me have my fun with him”, he kissed her hand.

“Are you kidding? I haven’t had this much fun in a while. I was almost tempted to tell him who you are, but it would be pointless”, she laughed freely now.

“He knows everything”, Carol agreed and lifted her up as she squealed in delight. “My poor oppressed and poorly educated wife”.

“How you mistreat me”, she snickered and kissed him.

“Is it wrong of me to think that this was so much fun? He’s obviously a terrible fool of Satan, but isn’t his fate supposed to be sad?”, he mused.

“It is sad when those people roam freely and spread their idiocy around, trying to seduce others away from the truth”, she shrugged. “It’s sad that some souls are actually making a choice to become thus. But it’s not sad that he’s made fun of and disposed of safely. It would be sad if we couldn’t do it”, she smiled again.

“Next?”, he raised an eyebrow.

“Next”, she nodded.

“Tell me about work”.

They were resting together in peace and quiet, having created a private cocoon just for themselves. The Gods and angels he met were all wonderful and he was thrilled, meeting so many new friends and establishing connections that could only be described as those of closest family. He even joked with Lady Lakshmi that he was legitimately her son, having spent two centuries in her womb, and she nodded appreciatively and for all intents and purposes adopted him for real. It felt amazing, having a major Primordial Goddess for a mother, and it didn’t feel at all like a joke. Lord Shiva, on the other hand, felt like a fatherly figure, someone he could go talk to if he had a problem, and it didn’t feel at all awkward that they were parts of two different couples. The vibe he got from them was that of a brother and sister who fiercely adored and respected each other. Everybody was so deeply connected with bonds of love, that felt more like steel cables than mere emotion. They all knew each other in and out, and the feeling of mutual respect and worship was overwhelming.

What was even more overwhelming was the fact that each person in Heaven wanted to see and hold Grace, as if feeling her existence in their arms will make her more real. He knew that her death was a shock to everybody, but information is one thing, and seeing it first hand was another. It wasn’t a shock; it was a stab to their collective heart with a poisoned blade. He thought it was even possible that all of Creation might have been fatally wounded and never have recovered, had she not been successfully resurrected.

It was an incredible thing. She was just one person. They’ve seen angels die before. There were lots of ‘batteries’ in that system Satan plugged him into. Each was an angelic soul, just like himself and his wife used to be before they became Gods. He heard about souls that willingly accepted Satan and became evil, and souls that were broken by him and turned into monsters. Those were all tragedies, and people remembered each one, for thousands of years, with sadness, regret and fear. He would have been one of them – a cautionary tale, someone who made a fatal mistake. They would have cried over him, they would have remembered him, but that would have been the extent of it.

Not Grace. She was something else, something different. Every other soul that died made a mistake, or committed treason, or a terrible sin. They betrayed God, betrayed Heaven, betrayed their friends, made terrible choices and ugly mistakes, and it was their fault. Grace was not just innocent: she was Perfection. For all everyone knew, she never did anything wrong in her entire life; kept doing kind and wonderful things, was an incredibly good person, a beloved family member to Gods, a stellar team member at work, reliable, kind, reasonable, smart and loving. She was an angel of such magnitude, that she was almost a Goddess in her own right, dark violet and indigo in colour, and enormous in size. All she needed was a husband to belong to, so that she could make that final step that would make God choose to be her – and she prayed to God to lead her to her true love, which he did. And then she found out what he did, how he doomed himself, and her heart exploded.

And, apparently, it took out most of Heaven with it. They looked like a disaster zone; half the Gods almost dead from trauma themselves. Nothing that ever happened, in the history of Creation, had nowhere near the impact. People on Earth talked a lot about how Christ was innocent but crucified, but that was nothing. He of course survived, as it was a merely physical thing, a death of the body. And it felt planed, pre-arranged with God. Unpleasant, but merely one bad day, with blissful eternity afterwards. It wasn’t a tragedy.

This was.

She was truly dead; her soul exploded from the extent of her agony. A true death, of someone who was the embodiment of perfection, and also connected with deep personal bonds to others; bonds of love, trust, family, personal debt. Her death wasn’t a shock; it was an asteroid strike that wiped out Heaven and turned it into a disaster zone worthy of Sodom and Gomorrah. He joked with her about it earlier, in Lakshmi’s womb, but it was quite different once he saw the aftermath with his own eyes, and all the traumatised people wanted to touch his wife to make sure she’s really here… thousands, millions of them. It was emotionally overwhelming and exhausting.

So, they made a private place for themselves, hidden from sight, just like that amniotic sac in which they spent their honeymoon, breathing each other and exchanging intimate thoughts. Just themselves again. No emotionally traumatised people to comfort.

“Work? What do you want to know?”, she smiled and nibbled his earlobe.

“What can I expect? What typical expectations people have, that you need to set straight? How do you approach them? Where do you draw the line between traumatised and misguided good souls, and truly wicked and corrupted ones?”

“Most expect some kind of an afterlife described by their religion. Also, they usually think in a very slow, linear way, in sentences, and it takes a while for them to thaw, to learn normal communication. They have an idea about what is sin and what is righteous, and they usually fear punishment for all sorts of silly things they think I will throw them to hell for. And I mean, the list is long”.

“Some think eating beef is punishable by hell. Some think eating pork is. Some think drinking alcohol occasionally is a dark secret I must never find out because if I do, they are doomed. Some think it’s a mortal sin if droplets of urine sprayed on them as they relieved themselves before prayer, because it would render them ritually impure. Some think they are ritually impure because they accidentally touched a person from a lower caste, or leaned on a grave by mistake. And sex, don’t even get me started. Every combination and permutation of sexual experience in existence is something someone somewhere thinks is a mortal sin worthy of hell. When they see that I don’t seem to care, they start checking if I heard them right, or whether I’m right in the head, because that’s how seriously they take things like masturbation – which is of course a part of one’s personal sovereignty – and someone somewhere taught them it’s a sin. I’m trying to explain that sin is when they actually hurt someone with their actions, or made a decision to reject God’s will, but deprogramming them from their nonsense takes a while, and it’s a normal part of the thawing process, as they lose spiritual rigidity a physical incarnation imposed on them. As they do, they start exchanging mental objects with me, with increasing speed, and they very quickly understand how I see things, and they relax and start to listen and trust. That part is normal for most good souls. There are, of course, exceptions, such as when some extremely advanced souls returned from Earth. Those are the good ones; they thaw very quickly, I go through their memories with them and explain things from a higher vantage point, I recover their suppressed memories from their prior existence, and so on”, she smiled.

“The bad ones… for the most part, I have what you would call a gut feeling about them. There’s nastiness, cruelty, arrogance, a spiritual scent of evil about them. In every case I knew instantly, but I still check very carefully, to be completely sure, and in some cases I call the Boss for a second opinion”.

“And then you flick them to hell?”, he kissed the tip of her nose.

“Yes, but hell isn’t a singular thing. There are multiple places that fit the description. There’s a place for godless souls, those who renounce the authority of Heaven. Then there’s a place for cruel, evil souls – murderers, torturers, rapists, but those are usually male. There are lots of women there – spreaders of gossip, of evil thoughts, evil traditions and customs such as female circumcision, of things that ruined lives, things that caused others serious harm while they used hardly more than words as weapons. They are terrible and toxic, and as bad as any murderer. There are women who are the reason behind some tropes from the fairy tales – an evil stepmother that sends the children from the first marriage to the forest to die. An evil bride that makes the old mother go to the forest and freeze. People think women are better than men because the most obvious criminals are men, but in hell both sexes are pretty equally represented. It’s just that female minions of Satan use different weapons to do his bidding”, she shivered.

“I always knew you were wise and brilliant, but you always manage to shock me by revealing exactly how much”, he whispered in awe. “I’m the luckiest man alive to have you”.

“Never forget it”, she snickered and gently kissed his neck.

“And all that I am is all yours, forever”.

“If you ever die again, I’ll kill you myself”, Hypatia’s frustration flashed through her teary eyes as she hugged Grace. “We almost died of grief”.

“I’m sorry, Mom”, Grace looked guilty in the happiest way possible.

“Young Lady, you certainly put us through some very hard moments”, Lady Shakti smiled and embraced the girl, when it was her turn. “Your way of becoming a Goddess was certainly the most painful, heroic and risky, out of anything I’ve seen. Every one of us feels we would die instantly to follow our husbands in death, but you actually did it”.

“Also, since your perfectly pure innocent heart broke once, and through no fault of your own, but due to providence of God, it is now the sacred place of the world, in which the Will of God will reside”, she turned her eyes inwards, and a golden fire danced above her finger, and took form of a Jewel of such power everybody shivered at the sight. The Jewel entered Grace’s heart, and she gasped and her eyes flashed gold as it integrated with her soul.

“Your heart never desired anything that wasn’t in accordance with the Will of God. Therefore, from now on, your heart is the Will of God”, Lady Shakti spoke her verdict, and bowed. Shivers went up every God and Goddess present, and a flurry of newborn souls exploded among them.

…

“So, can I have my job back?”, Grace smiled at Azrael. “How long have I been away, anyway?”

“It was always yours”, he bowed. “It’s seventeenth century now. You haven’t missed much. What we expected to happen, unfortunately did. The Turks advanced and established themselves on the Balkans. The Church has degraded morally and intellectually. A new schism formed, called Protestantism; great intolerance and religious wars ensued. Europe discovered a new continent, the one where they cut out hearts from the prisoners of war as sacrifice to their gods. Spain, England and France have colonies there now. There were advances in science, but unfortunately it all seems to be connected to the godless attractor of Satan, and is full of hatred of God and everything transcendental. Their basic assumption is that God doesn’t exist, and if something seems to be caused by God, it’s wrong and you need to look for the actual causes. Since people attributed things to God too casually in the past, in order to signal virtue and avoid using their brains, this actually seems to produce results”, he smiled. “And there are four new Gods. Other than you and your husband, that is”.

“Wow! Who are they?”, she jumped.

“Paul and Caterina, and Chiara and Bernard”.

“Well, that’s actually expected”, she smiled. “What are they doing?”

“Bernard and Chiara are Judges, Paul and Caterina are teachers”, he nodded approvingly. “Both couples are doing a wonderful job, as expected”.

“What are the qualifications for the job of a Judge? If it is possible, I would like to join my wife there”, Carol gave Azrael a shy look.

“You are quite qualified, but of course you would need some on-job training first, and you would need to be approved by the highest authorities”, Angel of Death nodded.

“You are approved”, smiled Lady Lakshmi.

“Thank you, Mother”, Carol bowed. “And thank you also for saving our lives down there”.

“You are very much welcome, my son”, she nodded.

…

“What does it feel like?”, Kay pointed at Grace’s golden heart.

“Incredibly peaceful”, she smiled. “It doesn’t feel as if my heart was different than before, but I feel… trusted. God put his confidence in me, knowing that I will always do the right thing. It makes me feel so happy, acknowledged and safe, that I can’t describe it”, she sighed. “I would expect being scared of myself now, second-guessing my every desire, because what if I wish for something rashly and do something wrong? But it’s nothing like that. It makes me so peaceful and balanced, that I am for all intents and purposes without desires. I wish only to remain in that state of balanced happiness, where God can reside safely in my heart, because I’m trustworthy. As this is all I desire, every desire I am ever going to have is going to be rooted in that”.

“And a birdie told me that it’s the two of you that actually worked the hardest on saving us”, Carol grinned. “Everybody else was grieving and in shock, while the two of you were brainstorming”.

“We were brainstorming because we were grieving and in shock, and that’s our way of dealing with pain”, Azazel smiled. “Our minds just kept trying to find solutions, until eventually we landed something that made enough sense to run it by Father”.

“We just couldn’t accept the fact that Grace was dead. It was something so much against the nature of God, that we just refused to accept it outright”, Kay shivered at the memory. “Perfectly innocent angels who are beloved by all, and on a steep trajectory to Godhood, don’t die because they did nothing wrong and just followed the Will of God. If they do, it must be the Will of God for them to be saved in some greater plan. Some could call it denial, but denial of things that don’t make any sense is actually a pretty good idea”.

“I certainly agree with you”, Grace smiled and hugged the girl. “Thank you both for not accepting reality”.