Lucifer's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Lucifer had turned one soul, but one soul was not an army. He stood at the field's edge where Abel had died. The blood had dried black in the grass. He felt God's eye pass over the land, searching, and he had no walls to hide behind. Every move he made happened in the open. He needed a place to work, a place God's gaze would skip. And the man who could build it was already marked. He found Cain beating a stake into the ground. The elder brother had fled east, deep into Nod. His beard was matted and his eyes ringed dark from sleeplessness. He hammered the stake with a stone, the same kind of stone that had killed Abel. When Lucifer's shadow fell across him, Cain spun, fists up, ready to strike. "You," Cain said. His voice cracked. "You put the stone in my hand." "I named your pain," Lucifer said. "You chose. And now God has driven you here, a wanderer. He marked you so none would kill you. Do you know why?" Cain lowered his fists. "So I live with it." "So you live hidden." Lucifer stepped closer. "His mark turns His own eye from you. You are the one place in Nod He will not look. Build here. Build a wall, a roof, a home. Make it the first city of men. He cannot watch what He refuses to see." Cain stared at the stake in the dirt. "A city." "Yours. A seat of power for the rejected. Men will come. The grieving, the cast out, the ones God passed over. They will gather under your roof." Lucifer did not say the roof would be his own too. Cain's jaw worked the way it had in the field. He picked up the stone. For a moment Lucifer thought he would throw it. Then Cain turned and drove it against the stake again, harder than before. "I will build," Cain said. "I have nothing else left to do." They worked through the day. Cain hauled stone and set the first wall. Lucifer felt the change the moment the stones stood waist-high. God's eye swept the land and slid past the rising wall, past the marked man, past Lucifer crouched in his shadow. The searching pressure lifted. For the first time since the murder, Lucifer could not be seen. He smiled and set another stone in place. He had traded one exposed soul for a hidden ground to stand on. From inside these walls he could gather many more Cains unseen. But the city was Cain's, built on Cain's grief and Cain's mark. Lucifer ruled nothing here. He only sheltered under a broken man's roof, and a broken man could cast him out.