A second panel to Divine Curse. The third panel, The Taste of Pomegranate.
The room was a thousand feet long, more than five hundred wide, the ceiling hidden in shadows both animate and inert. Soaring columns of onyx and obsidian, delicately filigreed into empty cages, held it aloft. The angel’s gaze wandered over it absently, barely acknowledging the ever-present satisfaction in what he’d wrought, a mockery of his beginning.
Lucifer sprawled in the largest of the three thrones on the raised dais. What would have been his Father’s chair, in that other hall, on another plane. One leg dangled from the carved jet-and-jeweled arm rest and his temple rested against his closed fist as he stared at the man kneeling before him.
“You see, my brother, what our Father gave to them,” he said. His voice, a mellifluous tenor, rose to fill the enormous space. “Gave them his spark — a soul of pure divine love — and this is what they do with it.”
Against the steps of the dais, to the right of the thrones and clustered about with moving shadows, a demon strained against his bonds and the feeding mouths.
“He granted them eternal peace,” Lucifer continued, swinging his leg over the arm and getting to his feet as he expanded on the subject. “Eternal love and all they have to do is accept it, but do they?”
