Free Morningstar by S. L. Armstrong

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
                                                 Psalms 150:6

    They called it my Fall.
    That's a convenience, though. That makes it sound as though it was entirely my fault. Oops, I tripped and Fell. Ha, ha, everyone laugh at the clumsy fool!
    The truth is, I was thrown out. I was cast from the sight of God. That's right - I was so horrible and my actions so beyond reproach that the all-loving God could not bear even to look at me. That's the truth. But the Truth is, He was afraid of me. He was afraid that if He allowed me to remain, that I would gather more of His faithful to me and return even stronger than before. So He, with His so-called infinite patience, expelled me, and all those who followed me, locking the gates of Heaven behind us.
    Now, here I am. Out of His sight, out of the reach of His hand.
    But, I am also out of his reach. The only one who mattered to me in the end. And I will never again feel his touch, see his glorious smile or hear his breathless whispers to me in the heat of our passion.
    Yes, angels feel passion, feel love. We were given Free Will, after all. And, oh how we loved. The passion of an angel cannot be weighed against anything Man can feel, for the passion Man feels is only a shadow of what we shared.
    Before time could be measured, I loved him. He stood by the Throne, took down all he saw, recorded all of Heaven's actions, and he was a Prince among princes. One of eight of us, exalted even over God's Voice. His dark hair would cascade over his pale shoulders, and his eyes were so expressive... but, I digress.
    He was my heart, I think. An angel of poetry and prose, an angel of creation; he was all I could not be. Radueriel was not only physical beauty personified, but his words, his actions and his thoughts were glorious to behold.
    I was the first. I was His most loved creation, next in honor only to His Son. God had given me an inner light that outshined all other angels, and placed me as their Chief. I was His wrath, His love, His might, and His gentleness. I was beautiful and terrible, and how I loved and honored Him above all in Heaven.
    I was perfect.
    In the times before the War, I found bliss in Radueriel's arms, before God took him from me.
    "In all of Heaven, thou art most beautiful," I said to him one night as he gazed up into the canopy of the dark sky. He turned those vibrant blue eyes to me, and a smile I can only compare to the light of The Father was bestowed upon me. Even in the cold nothingness of expulsion, I remember Radueriel and our love.
    Radueriel reached over and caressed my cheek, leaning in to kiss my lips softly. "All in Heaven pale when thy light shines, Morningstar," he whispered, his dark lashes fluttering against his alabaster cheeks. "No angel can claim perfection when they see thy face and all its radiance."
    We were like that. We were created to be flatterers, after all. Naturally, all this was expressed without the feeble trappings of mortal language. This was in the time before Eden, so there was no such thing, of course.
    I say 'the time before' as though it were a simple statement. The fact is that the mere existence of linear time was still a strange and unfamiliar concept then. Before that, there had been timelessness where we angels were with God in all things, feeling and seeing and knowing everything. But the act of creation severed us from that, and we knew for the first time of the differences between past, present, and future. That was the first Separation.
    As the First among angels, it was my task to calm the unease that rippled throughout the heavenly host. Linear thought was a frightening concept to many, so disconnected was it from 'the way things had been'. We could remember there was a time when we knew Everything, but the imposition of linear thought meant that we could remember nothing beyond that. Why would God do this to us, I was wordlessly asked again and again. Was