First, please allow me to state up-front that I'm aware that I'm taking some serious liberties with timelines here, to fit in some things that otherwise would have been squished into a few weeks. I'd like to apologize; I don't usually discount canon like this, but this story is odd enough that I figured it wouldn't be much of a problem. I had to throw out a lot of small canonical details, but I hope that what I left out makes sense and what I kept is recognizable.
This was written for Nico's "Sold Your Soul" challenge. I shouldn't have signed up for it -- the past month has been characterized by many nights of staying up way past my bedtime to get some writing time in -- but as a Biblical scholar and theologian, I couldn't pass up the chance.
This story owes so much to a number of influences. Chief among them are Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Mike Carey's Lucifer, and the publisher-owned-and-many-authored Hellblazer, all published by DC/Vertigo Comics; the music of Massive Attack, Karsh Kale, Delerium, BT, and the Pogues; my Hebrew Bible professor (who has the ability to throw me just the piece of information I need without me even having to ask); my experience with Kabbalistic magic and the Order of the Golden Dawn, who are wankers but who are wankers with a great deal of interesting information to be had; and, of course and always, my wonderful and amazing beta reader SarahQ, who reined me in when I tried to go too far and told me when I needed to make things clearer to someone who can't hold forth for twenty minutes at cocktail parties about the significance and interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4 and the Babylonian influences in the Old Testament.
The title of this story comes from the Pogues song of the same name, which I was first exposed to through Hellblazer. There's a lot of Hellblazer's John Constantine in this Lance, so much so that I had to give John a walk-on. (He is a scary motherfucker, and he is from London, so. See if you can spot the other walk-ons; there's at least one other one from pop culture.) The story was originally going to take a different direction, but there are still bits of lyrics that apply: "I wish that they could walk forever, on the earth, alone, unfettered, 'til they pray for consolation, 'til they beg for sweet damnation... Mother's eyes are sparkling diamonds. Still the moon shows no light. This rose is withered, may God deliver the rake at the gates of hell tonight."
I've tried as hard as I can to keep the information provided as accurate as possible, taking the actual historical context and information that's presented by any one of a number of characters and weaving that into an internally consistent theology. There are a few cases where I deliberately choose to discard historical or theological fact, or warp things a little to make it fit into the story, but on the whole, everything that I put in this story has some kind of background to it. The rest of these author's notes are going to probably be a rambling discussion of what I used, why I used it, and what I changed. If you're interested in the topic, please feel free to read on. If not, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the story.
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The Bible, of course, is a document that was written over the course of nearly a thousand years, and started out life as the product of an oral tradition. The first events discussed in the book of Genesis that can actually be practically dated are the Patriarchal histories, starting in Genesis 11 with the story of Avraham. Historians date the story of Avraham back to anywhere between 1800 and 1700 BCE. Meanwhile, the first time that these stories were written down was absolutely no earlier than 850 BCE, when the first author of the Old Testament wrote; the final version that has come down to us today was not pulled together from its separate sources and edited into a single book (the "Hebrew Bible" or "Old Testament" we know today) until the mid-fifth century BCE, while the Israelites were in exile in Babylon. Whether or not these stories were altered and/or changed (either in the thousand years during which they were only passed by oral tradition or in the writing down) is a matter of doctrine in many Christian churches, but most scholars believe that what we now have is victim of that distance and disassociation.
What this results in is a document that almost certainly contains the spirit of the original stories, but they've been added to and redacted as the time went by.
One of the problems that is very rarely addressed in a theological setting is the fact that ancient Hebrew was transcribed without vowels. For instance, take the first few words of the book of Genesis; without vowels, there is no way to determine what tense the words are in, and the changes in tense seriously impact the meaning. Read one way, it says 'in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth', and read another, it says 'when God was creating the heavens and the earth'. One sets the story at the absolute dawn of time; the other allows for there to have been time before it.
When Malachai quotes Genesis 6:1-4, he is using the King James (KJV) translation. It's not the best translation available -- in fact, it's generally considered to be pretty but not at all scholarly -- but it's good poetry. Nobody would ever use the KJV in a scholarly context, but this isn't a scholarly context, so I went for poetry instead of accuracy. The Everett Fox rendition of those verses get the same essence across; however, Fox is not only a lot more readable but a lot more accurate. I would highly recommend Fox's work to anyone who is interested in reading the Torah as history, poetry, or myth. His work attempts to produce an English translation that retains the rhythm, poetry, and spirit of the original Hebrew, and nearly everyone I know finds it far easier and more enjoyable to read than any of the more familiar translations.
Another consideration found in the original Hebrew of the Old Testament but not in translations is the name of God. God is referred to by many names; one author of the OT uses the word "Elohim" exclusively, while the other uses "YHWH". Other names found are Adonai and ha'Shem. Again, a long discussion of this would take me a few thousand pages to complete, but the distinction is important. "Elohim" is a familiar name for God, used before the revelation of His name to Moses. (It is also, interestingly enough, plural.) YHWH is the formal name of God. It is transliterated from the Hebrew consonants YHVH, and is generally taken to mean "I am who I am". Many believe that writing this name directly is disrespectful, and so substitute "Adonai", or "the Lord". Likewise, ha'Shem literally means "the Name" or "the One".
It is thought, in many traditions, that God has other names, and -- as is a common concept in magical lore -- that the names of a creature or being hold power. Judeo-Christian ritual mages call upon the Names of God -- which can be both commonly-known or secret -- to invoke those powers.
But enough about God. What about the Devil? The portrayal of the devil in this fic is perhaps, at first glance, startlingly sympathetic, but that's because of many of the things that the characters explain. An excellent book on the historical origins of the concept of "Satan", derived from the Hebrew term ha-Satan, is The Origins of Satan by Elaine Pagels. This book does an excellent job at presenting the case for "Satan" as a political concept of the early Church, rather than something that necessarily derives from the source material.
Perhaps the most clear look we get at early concepts of ha-Satan is the book of Job, in which ha-Satan, the Adversary, serves the function of God's prosecuting attorney -- he is clearly working for God, doing an unpleasant but necessary task. I've always liked that concept, so I chose to expound upon it here, in perhaps the most theologically heavy section of the story. I've cobbled together the story of the "Fall" from a number of different sources, and tried to piece it together into a coherent whole. By all rights, the characters should probably not be referring to him as Morningstar, which is a holdover from the days when the Israelites were in exile in Babylon and not a part of the original story, or as Lucifer or Lightbringer, which are Latin and Greek, respectively. But again, dramatic license.
In conclusion, I'd like to share a sentiment expressed by a friend of mine: "No one should ever educate me about anything, because I use it for evil purposes." I hope that I've managed to take these dense and varied concepts and put them into an interesting framework. This is a story about plot, not about relationships, and it's not my usual style. But I enjoyed writing it, and I hope you enjoyed reading it.