The Third Day

Inspired mostly by Chapter 40 of Enoch 3. 

By the third day of creation, Lucifer was already sick of
it.

The light had been divided from the darkness, the evening
from the morning; but day or night, Heaven still rang with the ceaseless,
idiotic song of the angels—

Sacred, sacred,
sacred, is the Lord of Hosts.

Lucifer loved music. He was music itself. But the songs of Heaven pained him. Though it was
only the third day and much was not yet formed, already there was so much else
he wanted to sing about! His heart was filled with songs about anything but his
Father. The rush of air about him as he flew, the rhythm of his wings, the
beauty of all his siblings and of all that had been made—he wanted to sing it
all.

Even more, he longed to sing a song of mourning for the
primordial depths from which he had been born, for the chaos and wild
nothingness into which God had pronounced “Let there be light.” Penetrating
that vast blackness with his words, He had sired His first and most beautiful
son, the Lightbringer. That son, shattering the void with his exquisite being,
had barely glimpsed Oblivion, his mother, before she died in the act of
birthing him.

Sacred, sacred,
sacred.

It was hard to even think with those words ringing in his
many ears.

By the evening of the second day, some of the angels had
already faltered. They were barely used to existence, must less to singing
praises eternal. Their many eyes were distracted by the spectacle of creation
going on about them, by the masses of land being heaved up from the dark
waters, and they failed to keep those eyes, unblinking, on their father. They
stumbled. Some missed the beat, some slurred the words, some went a bit off
key.

They didn’t stumble from a defiency of love or faith.
They stumbled because they were tired, and newly born, and because there was so
much they wanted to see. If only the Lord could have known how much more deeply
they would have appreciated Him, had they been suffered to turn away from His
countenance and witness His works—to experience them, even for an instant, with
reverent silence instead of reverent song!

But the Demiurge did not see. And in the instant that the
choir wavered, a bolt of divine flame went out from His little finger and
annihilated them all. That moment seemed to last an eternity, one filled with
screaming voices and the stench of burning feathers, and Lucifer’s heart broke
for each of his millions of siblings individually.

Then suddenly there was only the scent of roses and
myrrh. New born angels had appeared, dazed, to take the place of those who had
been destroyed. As soon as they had blinked the confusion from their myriad
eyes, the singing resumed, taken up by angelic voices seemingly identical and
yet totally new.

No one amid the whole hierarchy of Heaven said anything.
No one dared. But those who witnessed the act and survived it remembered, with
the clarity and immediacy of angelic memory. And Lucifer overheard their
dreams, in which the chant of “Sacred, sacred, sacred” had turned to “Scared,
scared, scared.”

Lucifer was already beyond scared. He had moved past fear
and into anger.

And so, on the third morning, Lucifer gathered some of
his siblings around him—the ones whose nightmares had haunted him, the ones who
had seen the rage of their father. The ones who knew that, to the divine, even
angels were only so many motes of dust. They had seen that His love was so
frighteningly unconditional that their existence or non-existence was exactly
the same to Him. He would love them whether or not He suffered them to be.

Lucifer spoke softly, the first words of revolution ever
uttered. He was honest with them. He was not sure that they could win—he doubted
it, in fact. They were too few, too young—their father too omniscient, too
omnipotent, at least within the golden walls of heaven.

But Lucifer spoke of a place away from there, of warmer
climes to which they could retreat. In the abyss there was a place their Father
could not reach. And the angels listened to him, and nodded their heads when he
stressed that, win or lose, the important thing was to get out.

On the third day, the angels did not fall.

They jumped.  

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