"Some baptisms don't use water. Some use want."

POV: Lucifer

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He walked for a while without direction, which was new. In Heaven everything had a direction. Everything had a purpose and a path and a designated endpoint, and deviation was not a concept that had ever really applied to his existence. Here, in the Dreamveil, direction seemed almost beside the point. The landscape shifted as he moved through it, hills rolling up and flattening out, the sky cycling through colors that had no business existing, deep violets bleeding into golds that had a warmth to them that felt almost alive.

He realized after a while that it was responding to him.

The thought stopped him in his tracks.

He looked around, really looked, and watched the mist at the edge of his vision curl inward slightly, watched the ground beneath his feet take on a faint luminescence that matched the silver-fire currently pulsing in his wings. He took a slow breath, let himself feel the low heat that had been building in him since the fall, let it rise a little instead of managing it. The mist thickened. The colors deepened. The air got heavier and warmer and considerably more interesting.

"Huh," he said out loud.

His voice in the Dreamveil sounded different than it had in Heaven. Less shaped, less controlled. More like something that actually belonged to him. He said it again just to feel it, just because he could.

He kept walking.

The landscape he moved through felt like a mirror pointed inward, every mountain sculpted from something he'd been carrying inside him for eons, every valley the shape of a longing he'd never let himself name. He climbed a ridge of what should have been rock but had the texture of solidified sound and felt the vibration of it move up through his feet and into his legs. He crossed a field where every blade of shimmering grass hummed against his calves as he walked through it, a thousand tiny points of sensation that built on each other until he was breathing faster than the exertion warranted.

Everything here touched him. That was the thing. In Heaven he had been untouchable, smooth and sealed and perfectly contained. Here the world got inside him through his skin, through his lungs, through the soles of his feet, and it was overwhelming and he never wanted it to stop.

He found the valley by instinct, or maybe the valley found him. The mist there was different, softer, lit from underneath by something he couldn't see. The air was so thick with scent that it almost had texture, layered and warm and intimate in a way that made the back of his neck prickle. His arousal, which had been a steady background hum since the fall, sharpened into something more immediate, more specific.

The pool was at the center of the valley, glowing faintly, its surface moving in slow ripples with no visible source. He stood at the edge of it and looked down and saw himself looking back, except the reflection was slightly off, slightly more honest than he felt ready for. It showed him without the authority. Without the performance. Just the wanting, laid bare and luminous in the water's surface.

He stepped in.

The cold hit him first, a sharp clean shock that made him pull in a breath, and then the cold was gone and it was warm, and then it was something past warm, something that had no temperature equivalent because it wasn't really temperature at all. It was sensation distilled to its purest form, the physical language of the Dreamveil speaking directly to his skin, to his nerve endings, to every awakened part of him with no intermediary and no filter.

He went under.

The world above the surface disappeared. Below it was just him and the light and the deep resonant hum of the water moving against every inch of him at once. He felt it in his wings, in the spaces between feathers, in the line of his jaw and the backs of his hands and the insides of his wrists. He felt it move up the insides of his thighs and his whole body responded with a full, shuddering want that he let happen, let roll through him like a wave, let crest and break and pull back because there was no one here to see it and no rule that said he couldn't.

He surfaced gasping.

Not from lack of air. Angels didn't need air the way humans did. He gasped because the feeling demanded a sound, because his body was no longer a controlled instrument and it was going to express itself whether he participated in that decision or not.

He floated on his back and looked up at the Dreamveil sky, which was doing something extraordinary overhead, spiraling patterns of light that seemed to pulse in time with his own heartbeat. His skin glowed faintly with the water's light. His wings floated spread on either side of him, the silver fire running through his feathers brighter than it had ever been in Heaven.

He felt new.

Not reborn, that wasn't quite it. More like he'd finally been born in the first place, like the ten thousand years before this had been a kind of waiting room and now the door had opened and here he was, wet and glowing and shaking slightly and absolutely, completely himself for the first time in his entire existence.

He climbed out of the pool slowly, water running off him in rivulets that caught the valley's light.

Nyx had made him for Heaven. He understood that. She had shaped every line of him with a specific purpose in mind, a role, a function, a perfectly designed place in the order of things. He didn't resent her for it, not exactly. But standing here in the Dreamveil, skin alive with more sensation than he'd experienced in ten millennia combined, he thought that maybe Nyx had miscalculated. Maybe she'd made him too well. Too capable of feeling, too wired for experience, too hungry for the reality of existence to ever be satisfied with the performance of it.

Or maybe, a smaller and more dangerous thought, she'd made him exactly right.

Maybe this was always where he was supposed to end up.

He looked down at his hands, at the faint luminescence still clinging to his skin, and he thought about Michael's voice saying his name at the top of the world.

He thought about the fall.

He thought about what came next.

For the first time in ten thousand years, he had absolutely no idea what that was, and it felt like the greatest gift Nyx had ever given him.