Angelology(116)

appeared to be like any other attending an elegant gathering. But with further inspection, I found a

number of guests to have an odd appearance. They were thin and angular, with high cheekbones and

wide, feline eyes, as if they had been cut from a pattern. Their blond hair, translucent skin, and

unusual height marked them as Nephilistic guests.

Voices lifted to the balcony as waiters moved through the crowd, distributing glasses of

champagne.

“This,” Dr. Raphael said, gesturing to the hundreds of revelers below, “is what I wanted you to

see.”

I looked over the crowd once again, feeling as if I might be sick. “Such merriment while France

starves.”

“While Europe starves,” Dr. Raphael corrected.

“How do they have so much food?” I asked. “So much wine, such fine clothing, so many pairs of

shoes?”

“Now you see,” Dr. Raphael said, smiling slightly. “I wanted you to understand what we are

working for, what is at stake. You are young. Perhaps it is difficult for you to fully realize what we

are up against.”

I leaned against the reflective brass railing, my bare arms burning against the cold metal.

“Angelology is not just some theoretical chess game,” Dr. Raphael said. “I know that in the early

years of study, when one is mired in Bonaventure and Augustine, it seems that way. But your work is

not solely winning debates about hylomorphism and drawing up the taxonomies of guardian angels.”

He gestured to the crowd below. “Your work is happening here, in the real world.”

I noticed the passion with which Dr. Raphael spoke and how closely his words echoed

Seraphina’s warning to me as I came to in the Devil’s Throat. Our duties lie with the world we live

in and must return to.

“You realize,” he said, “that this is not just a battle between a handful of resistance fighters and an

occupying army. This has been a war of attrition. It has been one continuous struggle from the very

beginning. St. Thomas Aquinas believed that the dark angels fell within twenty seconds of creation—

their evil nature cracked the perfection of the universe almost instantly, leaving a terrible fissure

between good and evil. For twenty seconds the universe was pure, perfect, unbroken. Imagine what it

was like to exist in those twenty seconds—to live without fear of death, without pain, without the

doubt that we live with. Imagine.”

I closed my eyes and tried to picture such a universe. I could not.

“There were twenty seconds of perfection,” Dr. Raphael said, accepting a glass of champagne from

a waiter and another for me. “We get the rest.”

I took a sip of the cold, dry champagne. The taste was so wonderful that my tongue recoiled as if in

pain.

Dr. Raphael continued, “In our time evil has overcome. Yet we continue the fight. There are

thousands of us in every part of the world. And thousands—hundreds of thousands, perhaps—of

them.”

“They have grown so powerful,” I said, examining the wealth on display in the ballroom below. “I

have to believe that it wasn’t always this way.”

“The founding fathers of angelology took special delight in planning the extermination of their

enemy. However, it was a much-studied fact that the fathers overestimated their abilities: They

believed that the battle would be swift. They did not understand how petulant the Watchers and their

children could be, how they reveled in subterfuge, violence, and destruction. Whereas the Watchers

were angelic creatures, retaining the celestial beauty of their origins, their children were tainted with

violence. They, in turn, tainted all they touched.”

Dr. Raphael paused, as if thinking over a riddle.

“Consider,” he said at last, “the desperation the Creator must have felt at destroying us, the sorrow

of a father killing his children, the extremity of his actions. The millions of creatures drowned and the

civilizations lost—and still the Nephilim prevailed. Economic greed, social injustice, war—these are

the manifestations of evil in our world. Clearly, destroying life on the planet did not eliminate evil.

For all their wisdom, the Venerable Fathers had not examined such things. They had not been fully

prepared for the fight. They are an example of how even the most dedicated angelologists might err by

ignoring history.

“Our work took quite a blow during the Inquisition, although we made up lost ground soon after,”

Dr. Raphael said. “The nineteenth century was equally worrisome, when the theories of Spencer and

Darwin and Marx were twisted into systems of social manipulation. But in the past we’ve always