the haunted kingdom by Charles E.J. Moulton (snow like ashes txt) 📕

dark side, sprang up, leaving Purity to look wide-eyed at its brother in fear and be crushed under his left hoof.
Not long afterwards, the Devil that took form had killed his own Purity and had officially fallen. It lay dead by its feet and the Devil fell to his own and cried.
Michael stood behind him, pushed Lucifer against the cave wall and knocked him unconscious.

IMPRISONMENT
The cage door shut with a bang.
“This is not supposed to happen!”
”It is the only thing that could!”
“No” the dark angel cried. “We were brethren.”
"Your dear oasis awaits and I am leaving. Have a nice eternity." Michael started walking away.
Michael turned around and looked his brother in the eye from across the lake.
The dark angel was rattling the bars, scorpions at his feet. “Why have you put me in a cage?”
Michael faced his brother and the look in his features was so solemn and serious that it took Lucifer a while for him to catch his breath. "How many times do I have to turn around and reprimand you,
Lucifer?” There was a long break. "Do you think that the only thing that matters to God is your glory?"
Michael walked across the water a few steps. "Maybe you will learn modesty in here.”
Lucifer laughed cynically. "Don't you think I hate what I have become?" Lucifer shook his head, laughing down at his paws and looking up. "Don't you think I wanted something different? Isn't that regret?"
Michael looked down and sighed. "You have only yourself to blame, brother! Real regret means honesty, not just feeling the emotion and letting it be at that." Outside the rain was pouring down and there was a hollow naked cry coming from the wind gushing through the tunnel beyond the lake. "You kept on pushing to become this." Michael shook his head and sighed. “You called yourself God, you broke the cardinal rule and tampered with creation. You pay for it now.” He pointed at Lucifer and opened his eyes so much that the whites completely surrounded the iris. It was a threat, but a threat with calm and cool deliverance. “Think about it.”
"Who says there are any cardinal rules, Michael? Your Lord?" Lucifer cried. "I disregard him."
"You were created by something that created everything. I have a task. My mission, task and life."
"Well, what is my mission, my task and life? Can you tell me that?" Lucifer queried.
"Guarding the light."
“I am the greatest light, Michael. Follow me and we can be like we were ...”
Michael shook his head. "Don’t do this."
"Do what?"
“Tempt me. I am not you.” Michael laughed and shook his head. "You are just afraid of the truth."
He pointed around him and cackled, painfully, emphasizing: "I was born with my will of glory, with my vanity and lust for greed and fame ... I was born with it." He looked at the rats and scorpions in the cage. He looked down at the rats. Lucifer looked uncomfortable. Then he looked up at Michael again who said nothing. "I know you think the same thing as I do. I saw it in your eyes when we fought. I see it now!“
There was a long pause before Michael spoke again. "I dare not, Lucifer.”
"Then I will dare you to rot. I will fight God in every way until I see something that grants me to escape my fate."
"You cannot escape fate... Please don’t tempt me…”
"I didn't want my fate!" Lucifer cried. "I want something real, something else than the perfection of your lovable God." He pointed at the white figure on the rock. "I want something real such as that." Michael said nothing, but looked at the body of Lucifer they way he had been. "Something real such as death …" There was a painful silence and the two did not say anything for a while. "I am plagued by conscience ... But your silence speaks volumes, my friend. And so my life will be the body, because this world here..." He gestured around him. "... is a hoax!" He pointed very intently. "I will fight your God if I ever get out of here. I will fight him, because I believe that he is not the creator. I was the first one and you all disregard me.” Lucifer started crying. Michael had been looking at Lucifer's angelic blond beauty and how he was now. The difference was so huge. How could he ever have become this?
“Are you the creator then, Lucifer? ARE YOU? Your vanity in saying things that made you into what you are now! ARE YOU THE CREATOR THEN? BLOOD BROTHER?” Michael turned to leave, but faced his brother again. “Do you know why it hurts me to see you like this?”
Lucifer shook his head. “You never told me on the beach why, Michael. Tell me now.”
“You never pressed to know. You left, mumbling something about He Who Eternally Excels …”
Michael looked up at Lucifer. In a trance, struck by some far fetched thought, he gazed at his brother and tried to grasp if this was really true what he was thinking. He who eternally excels. The words, the initials, were familiar. But it was too far fetched. Lucifer broke the spell.
“What is the answer to my question?” Michael was back, the thought still lingering in his mind.
“Everything you feel, I feel. The sub angel is still cowering in the corner. That hint is enough.”
Lucifer looked over in the corner of the cave. The sub angel he had created out of the Hwee-Aeill-Sihl-Tree was there and pleading for him to release him. That was it: Hwee-Aell-Sihl. He who eternally excels. What was the connection? The tree and Lucifer? Had God …
“He is your creation. He will follow you forever, Lucifer, until you give in.” Lucifer shuddered.
“We were once one single star.” Michael shook his head, he was cold and afraid. For the first time he was afraid. “I have to go, it scares me.” Michael started walking away for the third time, but stopped and called over his own shoulder. “That is why all of this hurts me more than you think. That sub angel, your demon seed, will come to haunt you, believe me. One day, right here, you will be haunted by this creature.”
“Yes?”
Michael nodded. “You made this angel out of a forbidden seed. That angel will be there all the while. Tutor him in sadistic love if you want. One day he will turn on you. He doesn’t belong anywhere else but on his tree.”
“What did you say before? We were one star? Is that the great secret?”
Michael sighed. “God told me the night before the occurrence at the beach. Aren’t you listening to me, Lucifer?”
Lucy shook with fear. “We were …”
Michael nodded. “You are only the darker me.”
Lucifer started getting restless and shaking the bars.
He spat the words until they almost became only consonants: “I want to change!” Lucifer cried: “Michael, take me back in time!” A scorpion crawled up through the bars up toward Lucifer. Unaware of its presence, he smashed his hand down on the cage floor upon it crushing it to pieces. He looked down on it. "I'm sorry!"
“Goodbye!"
“Don’t go!”
“I am leaving, because you won’t listen to my warnings.”
“What warnings?”
“Your diligently absorbing worries overshadow your danger. Your immortality will be walking hand in hand with anger and hate forever for what you have done.”
He looked up with a look of a victim scorned. "You ..." he said and pointed with a shivering hand, "are delusional!" His brother looked down. "Someone else is holding the strings! Someone else is in charge.”
“Who then? Who? Lucifer, wake up! You failed! Stop blaming everything on God. You say that because you cannot stand losing.”
“Is that all you think I care about? I tried to be a part of your group.”
"Our group was yours. You are an angel, made by God. Our group was the same as your group.” Michael looked down. “You should’ve resisted temptation.”
Michael started walking away, his wings flapping sadly behind him.
"I am telling you … Listen to me!" Lucifer saw a rat sitting beside him nodding its head. The rat said something. Again the hollow sound of the moaning wind through the tunnel beyond the lake gave off a peculiar eerie spiritual stench. The rat nodded. Then he suddenly jerked his head over at the dead body of himself as an angel on the rock. It sat up and looked at him. It smiled. Its eyes were wide open. It was jabbing with its mouth and singing strange songs of Darkness. Lucifer shook his head violently and rattled the bars. “Why are you leaving? I don’t want to be abandoned."
Lucifer was left alone with the rats and the scorpions and with the dead body of an angelic past on a rock. The rat seemed to smile. Back in heaven, God sent a storm over the land, killing everything above ground. The sub angel was still cowering in the corner, wishing himself back on the tree in Eden and the pure Lucifer was on the stone, seeing creatures only Lucifer could see. God forgot about the cave and its prisoner, whilst the prisoner remembered the dawn back on the beach. Inside the cave, Lucifer looked down the long January tunnel and its light that led to some unknown place where screams echoed in the dungeon.

ESCAPE AND FLIGHT OF A FORMER ARCHANGEL
Michael, Metatron and Raphael were walking about in the cave of Yambalah. Drops of ice fell down from the cave walls and there must have been several quantities of musk climbing the ivies of rich stone behind the cage that Michael had built for Lucifer years ago. The cage’s lock had been chewed open and the January tunnel in front lead into a light whose goal was yet to be discovered. Having passed the screaming birds had been difficult. Warding off the grabbing branches had not. But now they were here. Lucifer was not. He looked at the body of Purity, still dead on the stone as he had remembered.
"He who eternally excels above everyone lies lusty steadfast in his lifestyle." Was there a pattern?
"Remember I told you about the occurrence at the beach, Metatron?" The large angel nodded. “You told me that he spoke in riddles."
"What are the initials of that sentence on the rock?"
Metatron read the letters. "H.W.E.E.A.E.I.L.L.S.I.H.L"
Metatron rubbed his chin. “Does that fit the actual riddle?”
Michael half-smiled. "The tree. He was hinting.”
"Do you really think ...?" They looked at each other.
Raphael had been inspecting the cage, whose bars literally had been chewed open, when he came over to the stone. "There's a carving on the stone."
“Another?” The two angels joined their friend. “Let us gaze.”
He read it and looked at his friends with eager eyes. "Do you think Lucifer on purpose chose exactly those words to resemble the initials of the tree?”
Raphael shook his head. "The cage has been chewed open. Lucifer is no longer here ... And there is a carving on the cage floor ... It all fits. But why? Was Lucifer hinting he’d steal seeds from the tree?”
"What does it say?"
"Hwee-Aeill-Sihl. H.E.L.L. - He excels in Lover’s lust. The tree is growing."
"Just like on the stone." Metatron seemed to be in another world. “If I only knew.”
Involuntarily they looked at the January tunnel. ”There is a light down there.”
Michael nodded. "There are sounds.”
Metatron, Raphael and Michael were wandering about across the water of the January tunnel. Once they had reached the end of it, they