“I have a feeling that we are missing something about this inferno of madness that is running its course through Europe and, of late, its American colonies”.

Bernard was having coffee with his wife, resting after a long shift consisting of, mostly, victims of all sorts of violence, and religious fanatics of all kinds that got killed in religious wars, persecutions and uprisings. It wasn’t something that was foreign to him, but the whole thing showed patterns he was unfamiliar with, and that bothered him.

“What do you mean?”, Clare sipped her coffee in blessed peace.

“Those fanatics, or ‘Protestants’ of hundreds of different varieties, are in some ways similar to the Cathari, but in other ways…”, he suddenly turned rigid. “The printing press”, he smiled and relaxed.

“?”

“The printing press. That’s the problem. That’s causing, or at least accelerating, all the problems”, he smiled and sipped from his cup.

“You’ll have to explain it to me, because I don’t follow you. I don’t see how the printing press would have caused this. I would expect it to promote literacy, because it would make books accessible to larger masses of people, and that can be only beneficial, as educated people are less likely to be ignorant savages. Let’s just compare Lady Hypatia and the mob who killed her. I would venture a guess that none of them had read a single book”, she pointed out.

“There is something that is much more dangerous than a mob that hasn’t read a single book”, he nodded.

“What is it?”

“A mob that has read only one single book”, he looked his wife in the eyes.

“People have a wrong idea about the printing press. They think it suddenly creates entire libraries of books and makes them accessible to everyone who can read, and that in turn incentivises people to learn how to read, and suddenly you have educated, enlightened masses. That’s not how the printing press works. A printing press works by arranging lead casts of letters into sentences and forming a page. This is a laborious process. Then comes the easy part: roll black ink over the prepared template, put a sheet of paper on that, and press. You have one printed page. What you do next, is roll another coat of ink, put another blank page on the template, and press. Repeat this easy process a hundred times, and you have a hundred copies of that page. But then you have to painstakingly do the typesetting for the next page, and so on. As a result, the printing press is the best at making a large number of copies of a single book. In fact, the printing press isn’t that much faster at producing a single book than manual calligraphy. What it excels at is producing that one book in a deluge of copies”, he explained.

“I still don’t understand the problem”, she sighed.

“It doesn’t produce a hundred books. It produces a hundred copies of a single book. Tell me, do you know what the first printed book was?”

“Gutenberg’s Bible. He printed Vulgata in 150 or so copies”, she answered easily.

“Exactly so. And the next efforts went very much in the same direction. They printed lots of Bibles in Latin. Then they translated Bible into commonly used languages, such as English and German, and printed that, because they understand that their target audience doesn’t know much, if any, Latin. And as a result, they produced large masses of people who have read only one book”, he concluded.

“I think I’m starting to understand what you’re getting at”, Clare nodded. “You get illiterate people who have read only the Bible. It starts with the Old Testament, which is difficult to understand without the historical context, but it is full of parts that promote fanaticism and rigidity, as it’s full of stringent rules, harsh punishments and a vindictive God. Those people take it all at face value, and since it’s the only book they have ever read, and it’s holy scripture, it becomes their whole world, and they quote it where it does and doesn’t make sense, not even understanding properly what they are quoting. And since this project of mass printing the Bible happens in the context of the Protestant, ‘sola scriptura’ sects, the viewpoint where the Bible is the only book one will ever need becomes pervasive. There is no commentary by the saints to explain the nuances of meaning”.

“You got it. And this viewpoint encourages self-righteous fanaticism – they think they are basing their beliefs on the only thing that matters, that its meaning is self-evident, and everybody with a different understanding of any minute point of theology is, I don’t know, a wolf in sheep’s clothing sent by Satan to seduce them from true faith”, he smiled. “So, what did we have in the 13^th century? We had a limited number of books. They were placed in libraries. The variety of books was pretty large, from Aristotle and Plato to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. You had books on medicine by Avicenna, books on mathematics by Averroes, books on history by Plutarch, Illiad and Odyssey, books on architecture by our friend Vitruvius, books on herbalism by Hildegarde, and so on”, he smiled. “You had one copy of almost everything, and multiple copies of the Bible. If you wanted to learn, you had that accessible at the University or in a monastery. If you could read, you likely read at least a dozen books, but more likely a hundred or more. If you couldn’t read, you heard something from the Bible on the Mass, where the priest selected the most instructive and inspiring passages. He was limiting access to the potentially incendiary parts, and those leading to dangerous conclusions without abundant knowledge of context. But what happens when this filter is removed?”

“People read everything, starting with the most fanatical slaughters of the Old Testament”, she nodded. “And there are more passages with infidels being slaughtered, and all sorts of groups commanded to be stoned, and rules and regulations of every kind that promote self-righteousness that had cost Israel so dearly, and only in the end there’s Christ saying it doesn’t matter, and the point is to love thy neighbour and God, and love each other as he loved them, and the point is to be ready to give your life for your friends, rather than kill many infidels for the jealous God”, she considered. “I see where you were getting at with people who had read only one book being more dangerous than those who had read none at all. And the printing press created a monoculture of books, because it is a technology that makes it easy to print one book in a thousand copies, but it is much worse at creating a varied library of a thousand different books. And what everybody thought most important was to mass produce the Bible”.

“It produced something much worse than an illiterate mob. It produced a semi-literate mob that read only the Bible, and this fed their self-righteous narcissism, that was very much like that of the Cathari. And there’s another thing the printing press is even better at. It absolutely excels at making short pamphlets. Tell me, what do you expect those to be?”, he smiled.

“Well, considering how the Bible would be the first thing everybody thinks of, the second thing would be some kind of ideological propaganda, by fanatics who think what they have to say needs to reach as many people as possible, and is secondary in importance only to the Bible”, she smiled and sipped her coffee. “Of course, some would want to print their poetry or other literature, especially commentary on the Bible or scientific views that are repressed as heretical, and especially if they are wealthy enough to be able to finance printing, but for the most part, I would expect fanatics to print incendiary material that tries to motivate mobs to revolutions and violence. And since people are used to seeing things in print only if they received imprimatur from the Church, they assume that everything they see in print is true”, she nodded. “I see now”.

“The printing press is the newest technological manifestation of the ‘fama volat’ principle – it can spread incendiary rumours quickly, leading to upheavals. If you want to make people depose the King, you spread rumours. How do you that, buy a printing press and start a newspaper. It would be expensive, and yet cheap enough for people who would actually see the use in doing so. I think we have only seen the beginnings of it”, he gestured in dismay.

“Are there any benefits to this technology at all?”, she wondered.

“Some. Eventually, whole libraries of books will be duplicated and reprinted. Every school library will be able to afford the number of books that used to be reserved for the large Universities. Eventually, education will become widespread. However, I’m not sure it means what people now think it will mean. They think everybody will be like Aristotle or Augustine. I don’t think so. I think it will create an inflated number of dunces educated far beyond their intelligence, with lots of superficial knowledge but little to no wisdom. I think it will mass-produce arrogance and conceit of knowledge in large masses, with the number of actually intelligent and wise philosophers staying pretty close to what it always was”, he guessed.

“I would assume that mass education would be of greater use for natural sciences, where access to information means more than the depth of understanding. For instance, if you want to grow trees in an orchard, you need accurate instructions, but little wisdom is required”, she smiled.

“You are right, of course, which is why I would expect the natural sciences to flourish, and spiritual sciences to stagnate or vanish outright”.

“And let’s not forget: if anyone can print a book in a thousand copies, and most of those books are of poor quality, one’s ability to find a book of good quality will be greatly diminished, as I would expect the number of good books to grow by a trickle, and the number of bad ones by a deluge”, she nodded. “If you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, you will have to go through thousands of worthless books in order to find a good one”.

“Which is why people will either stick to the known good ones, or read whatever they manage to stumble upon by random chance”, he assented. “But this is of little concern as of now. What worries me is the ease with which this technology spreads incendiary material that promotes fanatical violence. All it would take is the right book at the right time, and it could burn down half the world”.

“Qur’an comes to mind as confirmation of your thesis, my Lord”, she bowed and kissed him.

“That, and worse, my Lady”, he bowed back and smiled.

“What can even be worse? Have you read it?”, she gestured in dismay.

“I have, and I regret it greatly, for it resembles a mixture of garbled sentences hallucinated by a madman who thinks himself a prophet. But I fear very much that we won’t have to wait long in order to see for ourselves”.

“They had witch hunts recently. They burned hundreds of women at a stake only in England”, her look was grim.

“And with accusations so preposterous, I would not only have dismissed them summarily, but also conducted a thorough investigation of the accuser, since most of them look either insane, or evil with the spirit of Satan”, Bernard brooded darkly. “What frustrates me is that the enemies of the Church now spread the propaganda accusing the Church of this nonsense, whilst it never would have been possible in my time. They act as if all that superstitious nonsense is the product of the teachings of the Church, rather than the destruction of the Church by the plague and the resulting return to barbarism and the rise of the schismatic movements”.

“You are of course right. In our times, if someone accused a woman of being a witch, he would have been in serious trouble for slander, and rightly accused of crimes himself. Now, when one accuses a woman of being a witch, she is the one who is in trouble”, Clare frowned. “And what do they even mean by a witch? I’ve heard only nonsense that defies reason – witches flying on brooms and making people’s cattle die of sickness and so on. There is no chance whatsoever of any of it existing”.

“Of course there isn’t. No inquisitor in the world would have anything to do with such preposterous nonsense. In my time, when a woman was accused of witchcraft, the accusations were almost always true – there always was some village herbalist who dabbled in dark magic as well, and brewed potions out of toxic herbs and hallucinogenic compounds of other origins, where the only thing that made a difference between a hallucinogenic potion and a deadly poison was dosage, and often poisoning was the true intent. People actually died, and then of course the woman behind it was in trouble, but the actual accusation was murder, not something nebulous. We had cases where women performed abortions of pregnancy and infanticide. In every single case where actions were taken, witchcraft was merely a method of committing murder, and not a charge in itself. What they are doing these days is a mockery of religion as well as a mockery of justice. Were it so easy to prove witches flying on brooms, it wouldn’t be so difficult to prove the existence of God”, he concluded.

“It’s actually quite easy to prove the existence of God”, Clare smiled. “You only need to die and come to our office”.

“I’m afraid most people would prefer to have the evidence beforehand”, he smiled, lifted her by the hand and kissed her. “Coffee break over, my love. Let’s get back to work”.

“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 for 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”.