Chapter Text
A Prologue in Heaven…
Out of all the Hosts of Heaven, the Recording Angels in the Firmament of Records have the most transcendently beautiful names.
Not that anyone has ever heard them.
Not even God has literally heard them, although She knows them all by heart. The names of Recording Angels are designed to be understood, but not uttered or written. Whilst writing such a name out in translation would not be directly fatal, even for a human, its intricacies would render all other joys of life adust — and if the mortal calligrapher lived to be a hundred, they would die blotting the ink on the first syllable of first word of the angel’s extraordinary name.
Even amongst lower-ranking angels, for whom time is much less of an issue, those names are too perilous to contemplate in their entirety.
This is because the language of the Firmament of Records is terrifyingly condensed. It compares to Enochian as a spoonful of neutron star might compare to a spoonful of sunlight, can capture an entire human life in an eyeblink, and is as close as even an angel can get to the internal dialogue of God, which is so efficient that it goes by the same warning euphemism on Earth as it does in Heaven: the Word.
Handling such a memory load is potentially dangerous, fraught with the risk of trapping the Recording Angel inside its own work, which can be so nearly-indistinguishable from reality that it takes a potent miracle to disengage oneself. No angel ranked lower than a Dominion can manage it safely. Despite the funerary monuments that show them as robed scholars, Recording Angels never appear on Earth, since the consciousness of even the smallest of them is incomprehensibly vast. Even if they could don a corporation, they could never pull off the trick of seeming at all human.
The humbler Powers and Principalities that can communicate with these intricate beings take binding oaths of silence, in case they are tempted to try uttering the language used for inscribing the Records. Wonder, and not the Devil, would tempt them to this, but it would nonetheless be disastrous.
But silence has its compensations, and every one of these mute Powers and Principalities is a deep scholar in their own right. All have individual fields of interest — not Earthly lands, but places in the geography of the human condition. There are Powers of Inspiration, Powers of Logic, Powers of Courage, and Powers of Art; there are Principalities of Penance, Forgiveness, Vows, and Quests. In scope, they compare to the Recording Angels they serve as bees to their hive, or gulls to their cliff-face. Their feathers are fringed for noiseless flight, like the feathers of owls.
There are so many of these quiet Powers and Principalities thronging the Firmament of Records that from a distance, they can look like feathers themselves, as if somewhere far above, someone is plumping a pillow the size of an interstellar cloud. So let us single one out: an angel named Vereviel, a hard-working Principality of Vows, on an Earthly date sometime in the late 1790's.
—⁂—
Unlike many other classes of angel, Vereviel and her colleagues in the Firmament of Records wore coloured robes. This was so that she stood out easily from her huge, nacreously-gleaming colleague, a Recording Angel so vast that it would otherwise be difficult to distinguish Vereviel as she went about her appointed Tasks. Though Vereviel’s feathers were snowdrift-white, her robe was a deep violet. She was long, austere, and tireless, flying to and fro across the vast regard of the Dominion she served with no more commotion than a floating hyphen. It was quiet, regular work. From the perspective of a Recording Angel, the sum of all human longings, fears, scientific discoveries, sexual awakenings, great betrayals, pangs of birth and agonies of death evens out to a hum — with occasional key changes for earthquakes, plagues, and the fall of Empires. For most tastes, Vereviel’s sequestered existence would be almost oppressively peaceful.
Vereviel, however, was incapable of boredom. Performing the same tasks, again and again, to the background hum of recorded human history was her idea of bliss. She was therefore disconcerted when during a routine flight around the perimeter of her Recording Angel, a trip that would ordinarily keep her aloft for months, she became aware of a faint discrepancy.
Vereviel halted in her patrol, hovering in the companionable but wordless focus that was the attention of the greater Angel. A discrepancy was unusual, but in itself, no cause for immediate alarm. Such things happened perhaps once a hundred years, and sometimes not at all in half a millennium. The problem was that it had happened before, and recently. Three times in one century, and in the same approximate area? The Principality of Vows reckoned that that was improbable.
> I concur <
…agreed the Recording Angel, its huge consciousness synchronising directly with her own thoughts. And in the symbolic Conversation the Angel was having with the history of the Earth, something spun down, turning just slowly enough for Vereviel’s lesser comprehension to perceive it, in the iridescent language that must never be spoken aloud.
Angels of Vows did not enjoy discrepancies. Vereviel liked predictability, and promises, and she liked those promises followed to the letter. Her Recording Angel sensed this misgiving, as it sensed all things, and sent out a wave of carefully-patterned reassurance. It requested her not to be afraid, and then it showed her where the discrepancy was located: deep within Heaven’s accounting of the performance of Angelic Tasks.
It was not that the angel concerned — a fellow Principality, on an indefinite Terrestrial posting — had failed in his duties. Quite the opposite, in fact. He had started to over-perform. Only at one particular type of Task, to be sure, but that Task was a delicate one, and although he was considered an experienced Earthly operative, he was not otherwise exceptional.
Vereviel’s Recording Angel was in some remote and awesome way her friend, as a human might consider the sky or the ocean to be their friend. Her Friend was vast. Her Friend was powerful. Her Friend was great, and their astounding, flawless memory would allow God to prevail, even over a world marred beyond recognition by Celestial war, even over oblivion itself.
Her Friend could trace the ultimate causes of many puzzling events...but her Friend had no explanation for this. That in itself was troubling to Vereviel.
> My good Principality Vereviel, do not let yourself be disconcerted. <
Vereviel mustered all her concentration in order to reply to the Recording Angel it its own language. It was by far the most taxing of her Tasks, requiring the synchronisation of colour, pattern, sound, and even emotion. Her wings beat the air more slowly and musically, her halo extended until in enveloped her whole form, and within it, a thousand colours began to shift themselves into meanings.
> You have shown me a thing that should not be. <
> It is beyond our remit, Principality, to say what should and should not be. <
> This is true. How, then, should we proceed? <
> It might not be beyond your remit to investigate if things are indeed on Earth, as they appear to be in Heaven. <
> My remit? My remit is to be your aide in the Firmament of Records.<
> And elsewhere, if need be. I am not going to manifest on Earth and scare the wits out of all and sundry, but an anomaly like this needs an explanation. Besides which, you have not been to Earth for …let me see now…a little under two thousand years? <
> But I cannot go. Even on Earth, I am still sworn to Silence. I can listen, I can observe, but how can I do anything more? <
> Not everything needs a presentation speech. A wondrous gift may be given silently. <
> A gift? Not for us, surely? <
There was a twinge of terror in the idea. A few devout mortals on Earth believed it to be better to give a gift than to receive one, but for even the haughtiest angel, it was an obvious truth. And what was a mystery, if not a carefully-wrapped gift? Vereviel had not wanted a gift, not all to herself. She did not know what to do with it, and her wingtips shivered.
> Of course it is not for us, <
reflected her enormous and considerate Friend, in shifting auras of viridian and hope and D sharp major,
> it is for the mortals Below, but I think we will need help to share it. Do you have any suggestions? <
To Vereviel’s intense relief, she did have a suggestion. Only one suggestion, but it was, she represented humbly, an important name and someone she had known since Biblical times. Someone who had reason to take her seriously, someone for whom she had once done a considerable service, and someone whose signature colour she still wore: violet for the Archangel who was the Emanation of Yesod, the Third among the Seven Mysteries, and the Treasurer of the Vault of Souls. There was a pause, while she silently unfolded his Name — his full Name, of course, rather than the terse Hebrew alias he went by on what were (by angelic standards) his quite frequent sorties to Earth.
Something curious rippled across vast consciousness of the Recording Angel, akin to the wry satisfaction obtained by a human on working out a crossword clue that would furnish several unsolved words with additional letters. If Vereviel did not know better, she would have said that somewhere within its being, her Friend was amused.
> I too know Gabriel of old. Providence never fails, it seems. <
It may seem impossible that the Archangel Gabriel’s real Name should be anything other than imposing and authoritative, but in fact it was poetic and playful, in the serious way that God can be playful: a hyperbolic colour with a perpetually accelerating beat, a message within a message within a message, a chain of allusions that only the Almighty could reliably get, and which Gabriel himself no longer had time for.
It had, after all, been bestowed on him a long time ago.
…and a Prologue on Earth
‘An arrangement’. That was what the angel had called it at first.
Self-respecting demons did not make arrangements. Where other demons were concerned, they might engage in self-interested coöperation. With humans, they made bargains, pacts, or contracts — and although it was unsporting to create a truly irresistible temptation, there was no Infernal Law against tipping the odds in one’s favour.
There was also no Infernal Law against job-sharing with one’s adversary, but Crowley had an inkling that this might be an oversight. So when Aziraphale had started to use the bland and harmless word for performing the odd temptation himself, in return for Crowey’s interventions elsewhere — all according to arrangement, foul fiend — the demon had gone along with it. ‘An arrangement’ sounded simple, and easy to explain. In the demon’s considerable experience, nothing to do with the arrangement itself was either of those things. It hadn’t been for the sake of expediency that he’d first suggested it, but for the sake of knowledge, in order to answer a question that had been niggling him for thousands of years: What if I did the good thing, angel, and you did the bad one?
Would that even be possible?
He hadn’t expected Aziraphale to agree to try the experiment, let alone name it. He’d been more than taken aback when, despite its rocky beginnings, the project proved a success. He’d become distinctly thoughtful as ‘an arrangement’ had morphed, over the centuries, into the more confiding ‘our arrangement’. Occasionally, after a few glasses of something, the angel even referred to it as ‘our little arrangement’, which meant the impeccable bastard was about to ask for a favour.
It had occurred to Crowley, tutelary fiend of belated insights, that the first time Aziraphale had used the diminutive, a sensible devil would have cut his stick, slung his hook, and shown a clean (albeit scaly) pair of heels.
But when the scheme spontaneously acquired the definite article and a voiced capital, somewhere around the Wars of the Roses, there was no excuse at all. Anything calling itself ‘The Arrangement’ was a pocket conspiracy, but by that time Crowley had discovered two things: firstly, that whenever he agreed to do a favour for Aziraphale, the angel tended to beam to himself, in a way that the demon could never classify as either innocent or calculated. Secondly, that when it came to certain temptations, Aziraphale had the edge on him, and that was fascinating.
It wasn’t as simple as sex or no sex. Aziraphale might have a prim exterior, but he was a man-shaped creature of the world. When it came to tempting ascetics into giving up their austerities, the angel was on fire (all right, not literally), precisely because he never brought up the subject of austerities. Instead, he had a system of self-exculpatory treats and indulgences that was more intricate than anything Hell could come up with. He invited people to share things with him, to be generous to another person, and then, by extension, to be more generous to themselves. He got excellent results from the smallest and least sinful of starting positions.
This untaught talent had a 17% edge on Crowley’s best efforts — which was perfect, just high enough that the demon could rake in the extra commendations without singeing anyone’s eyebrows. It was just a pity it wasn’t street legal. In the one of the fits of speculation to which the Serpent of Eden was constitutionally prone, Crowley imagined himself recruiting a baker’s dozen of angelic pragmatists, letting them loose on the clergy, then putting his feet up while the commendations rolled in. That wouldn’t do. He couldn't risk the remote possibility that some Downstairs pen-pusher might notice.
It wasn't all plain sailing: Aziraphale was hopeless when it came anything mean-spirited, and a disaster waiting to happen with adultery. It wasn’t the angel's fault, but he barely had to step over the threshold of a partway-broken home before there were tears, reconciliations, and occasionally dead giveaways like roses round the door and cooing doves. Crowley took to going through his own schedule and rating his future diabolical deeds from one to five, according to how likely Aziraphale was to cover the demon’s temptation record with glory, or bollock things up beyond all recognition. He could only imagine that Aziraphale had a similar system with regard to him.
This assumption was substantially correct.
Crowley’s misgivings about The Arrangement coalesced into something more significant in the declining years of the Eighteenth Century. King George III, on temporary reprieve from his tragic porphyria, was still the upon the throne of Britain, Napoleon had not yet ascended to a similar uneasy perch in France, Prussia was a growing power and the House of Hapsburg a declining one, and their corner of the planet had just gone through what philosophers had optimistically dubbed the Age of Enlightenment — which, as Crowley observed, was all very well until you tried naming the Age that was going to come after it.