What Uriel Remembers of the War, a List

I. How quiet everything was, after Lucifer fell.

II. The older angels had stood around in small groups, their heads bent together, whispering. All of them looked tired, and worried—though Uriel hadn’t known what to call that grey and pinched expression. Grief and fear hadn’t been invented, before.

III. Gabriel putting a sword in her hand, explaining what it was for.

IV. The first angel dead on the battlefield had winked at her once, during lauds.

V. Keeping her breathing even and deep as first Cambriel, then Sariel and Gader’el slipped from the barracks in the dead of night. She would learn of their falling the next morning, written in the exhausted lines of Gabriel’s face.

VI. (Why did you not stop them? Miriam, daughter of Jochebed, will ask when Uriel tells her this story. You might have persuaded them to stay.

No one who contemplated such betrayal would be worth stopping, Uriel answers with a shrug of her wings. Miriam calls her unfeeling, but then, Miriam has never known war. Uriel has known nothing but.)

VII. Gabriel stopped smiling at some point after the onslaught on the third sphere.

VIII. Her first impression of Earth was of a strange, small, and intricate machine wrought in carbon molecules and so many moving parts that watching them for too long made Uriel dizzy.

It wasn’t the place of a soldier to question why so many of her brothers and sisters had died for a race of creatures made up mostly of fluids and willful defiance. So Uriel doesn’t.

IX. The Garden was empty by the time Uriel was stationed at its gates. For centuries, her only contact with the wider world was the dispatches she received—brief, formal, occasionally with Gabriel’s scrawled commentary in the margins.

The flaming sword rested heavy in her hand, and at night she squinted up at the miniscule sky (like looking at eternity through a dewdrop), trying to find stars no longer there.

X. She was forgetting the old songs—what did gloria in excelsis deo even sound like, without the fife and drums?

XI. Which war? the humans ask, after they have gotten in the habit of naming theirs to keep them straight. Which war? they ask, and she replies, again and again—The only one my family means, when we say ‘the war.’